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October 28th, 2016

Global Warming Could Be The Best Way To Terraform Mars

An artist’s conception of what Mars looks like today, juxtaposed with what Mars may have looked like earlier in its history, when the planet had a thicker atmosphere.

We’ve been looking for life on Mars for centuries. Humans have parsed every geological feature that we can find for traces of living neighbors, or at the very least, evidence that some type of creature lived on the red planet in the past. So far, no luck.

In the absence of evidence of life, a not-so-new idea is gaining ground: If we can’t find life on Mars, maybe we could bring life to Mars. Not only that, but we might be able to change the nature of the red planet itself, and turn a dry and lifeless world into a mirror of our own blue and green marble.

It sounds like science fiction, but researchers in the public and private sector are already looking at how current technology can terraform Mars, in part because it would make permanent human settlements much more plausible.

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Posted by tourdemars to: Terraforming

June 25th, 2015

DARPA: We Are Engineering the Organisms That Will Terraform Mars Motherboard

It’s no secret that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is investing heavily in genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Whether that excites or terrifies you depends on how you feel about the military engineering totally new life forms. If you’re in the excitement camp, however, here’s a nugget for you: DARPA believes that it’s on the way to creating organisms capable of terraforming Mars into a planet that looks more like Earth.

The goal of terraforming Mars would be to warm up and potentially thicken its atmosphere by growing green, photosynthesizing plants, bacteria, and algae on the barren Martian surface. It’s a goal that even perpetual techno-optimists like Elon Musk think isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but it’s a goal that DARPA apparently already has its eyes on.

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Posted by tourdemars to: Terraforming

May 29th, 2015

We Need Three Planets to Keep the Human Race Alive, NASA Scientist Says Motherboard

“The entire ecosystem is crashing,” Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist of NASA’s Langley Research Center said Thursday. “Essentially, there’s too many of us. We’ve been far too successful as the human animal. People allege we’re short 40-50 percent of a planet now. As the Asians and their billions come up to our living systems, we’re going to need three more planets.”

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Posted by tourdemars to: Terraforming

May 20th, 2015

Elon Musk and Craig Venter Want to Print Life on Mars Motherboard

Elon Musk knows that Mars will not be terraformed in his lifetime. Still, the SpaceX and Tesla renaissance man does have a vague plan on how to seed life there: He wants to team with legendary geneticist Craig Venter to print life on the Red Planet.

Printing life is not something that’s going to be done tomorrow, but, as we’ve covered before, it’s not a line of thinking that’s totally unprecedented or outside the realm of possibility. Some of NASA’s very best scientists believe that in order to colonize other planets, we’ll need to encode the human genome into bacteria, send those bacteria into space, and reassemble the genomic data they carry once they finally land on another planet.

This is a school of thought that Musk also subscribes to, which is notable, because Musk is, at the moment, the single human most likely to enable our colonization of other planets.

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Posted by tourdemars to: Terraforming

May 14th, 2015

Planting an Ecosystem on Mars, NASA Funds Research For Producing Oxygen On Mars

Taming the brutal environment of Mars for future human explorers to survive and thrive there may demand a touch of “ecopoiesis” – the creation of an ecosystem able to support life.

The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program is funding cutting-edge work by Eugene Boland, chief scientist at Techshot Inc. of Greenville, Indiana. The scientist has been busy working in the firm’s “Mars room,” which houses a test chamber capable of simulating the Red Planet’s atmospheric pressure, day-night temperature changes and the solar radiation that cascades upon the planet’s surface.

Inside the Mars room, Boland and his team are testing the viability of using ecosystem-building pioneer organisms to churn out oxygen by using Martian regolith. Some organisms within the test bed experiment planted on the Red Planet also could remove nitrogen from the Martian soil.

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Posted by tourdemars to: Humans To Mars, Terraforming

August 20th, 2014

We can terraform Mars for the same cost as mitigating climate change. Which would you rather? The Telegraph

One frequently quoted study of the global costs of mitigating climate change put them at around $3 trillion by 2100, with the main benefits being felt between 2100 and 2200. Here is alternative way to spend around the same amount of money with around the same timescale of payback: terraforming Mars. A standard estimate is that, for about $2-$3 trillion, in between 100 and 200 years we would be able to get Mars from its current “red planet” (dead planet) status to ” blue planet” (i.e. a dense enough atmosphere and high enough temperature for Martian water in the poles and soil to melt, creating seas) – achievable in about 100 years – and from there to microbes and algae getting us to “green planet” status within 200 to 600 years.

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Posted by tourdemars to: Terraforming

March 31st, 2014

Powerful Jets From Mars-Bound Comet Spied by Hubble National Geographic

After lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system for the past one million years, a comet is heading for a close encounter with Mars. The Hubble Space Telescope is keeping tabs on the icy interloper, seen in just-released images.
Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring), which now lies some 353 million miles (568 million kilometers) from Earth, was discovered by Australia’s Robert McNaught, a prolific comet and asteroid hunter, more than a year ago. NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, has been refining the comet’s exact trajectory ever since.
While researchers have ruled out a direct collision with Mars, the dusty coma of the comet (which is nearly as large as the entire Earth) will sweep directly across the red planet. The comet core, or nucleus, is expected make its closest approach to the red planet on October 19 at 2:28 p.m. ET. It will pass within 85,600 miles (137,760 kilometers) of Mars—less than half the distance from the Earth to the moon.

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Posted by tourdemars to: General News, Terraforming

March 20th, 2014

We Need Three Planets to Keep the Human Race Alive, NASA Scientist Says Motherboard

It’s no secret that uncurbed climate change and population growth are going to (and already have) put stress on the planet. But the situation is getting so bad that one prominent NASA scientist says we have to start thinking about terraforming Mars and that, in order for the human race to survive at current levels, we will eventually “need at least three planets.”
“The entire ecosystem is crashing,” Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist of NASA’s Langley Research Center said Thursday. “Essentially, there’s too many of us. We’ve been far too successful as the human animal. People allege we’re short 40-50 percent of a planet now. As the Asians and their billions come up to our living systems, we’re going to need three more planets.”
Bushnell was discussing the release of The Millennium Project’s “State of the Future,” an annual report that looks at global challenges and how they might be solved. He said that Mars is a good start, but we’d soon need even more space to live.
“If NASA terraforms Mars, that’ll take about 120 years, and that’s only one planet,” he said. “We’d need more shortly.”

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Posted by tourdemars to: Humans To Mars, Terraforming

March 28th, 2013

Why a Mars Comet Impact Would be Awesome Discovery News

When Jupiter’s tides ripped Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 to shreds, only for the icy chunks to succumb to the intense Jovian gravity, ultimately slamming into the gas giant’s atmosphere, mankind was treated to a rare cosmic spectacle (in human timescales at least). That was the first time in modern history that we saw a comet do battle with a planet… and lose.
But next year, astronomers think there’s a chance — albeit a small one — of a neighboring planet getting punched by an icy interplanetary interloper. However, this planet doesn’t have a generously thick atmosphere to soften the blow. Rather than causing bruises in a dense, molecular hydrogen atmosphere, this comet will pass through the atmosphere like it wasn’t even there and hit the planetary surface like a cosmic pile-driver, ripping into the crust.
What’s more, we’d have robotic eyes on the ground and in orbit should the worst happen.

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Posted by tourdemars to: General News, Humans To Mars, Life on Mars, Mars Exploration Rovers, Mars Express, Mars Odyssey, Mars Science Laboratory, Planetology, Reconnaissance Orbiter, Terraforming

February 28th, 2013

Comet impact could make Red Planet inhabitable RT (Russia Today)

A comet near Mars may strike it in a powerful impact, potentially making the planet much warmer. The Red Planet is luring many entrepreneurs, including billionaire Dennis Tito, who aims to beat other nations by sending a man and a woman to Mars.
The make-or-break window for this possible game-changer is October 2014. At that time, an Oort cloud comet called C/2013 A1, first discovered last month, will approach Mars, missing it by about 35,000 km, which is quite close.
However the comet’s trajectory is still uncertain, which leaves a small chance it could impact the planet, said Russian astronomer Leonid Elenin, who worked on calculating the course of the celestial body. The comet will be travelling at a speed of 56 kilometers per second relative to Mars when it passes; if they do collide, the resulting explosion would be equal to a 20,000-gigaton bomb blast – powerful enough to leave a 50-kilometer crater on the planetary surface
The event would trigger a major change of the Martian climate, Australian space scientist Robert Matson explained. The impact would evaporate large amounts of water and carbon dioxide ice from the comet, spread across a planetary scale, making the climate on Mars much warmer due to the greenhouse effect.

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Posted by tourdemars to: Future Missions, Humans To Mars, Terraforming