The Wild Plan to Terraform Mars by Slamming Asteroids Into It

That’s often If the more research and understanding planets are thought to be, the more likely they are to live in them. For example, Mars is the closest object to Earth in terms of distance, but the data shows that its conditions are highly hostile in life.

despite this, NASA has plans To send astronauts to the Red Planet, and Elon Musk is a supporter of the voices that establish the human presence there. In the short term, the solution to colonizing Mars is to build special enclosed habitats. However, some suggest more ambitious strategies in the long run. Space colonization enthusiasts propose a terraforming Mars. In other words, they change planets to acquire similar characteristics to Earth.

Scientists accept that the Terraforming Mars proposal is decades apart, but calculations are already underway to assess how this Titanic process works. Leszek Czekovsky, professor at the Institute of Geophysics at the Polish Academy of Sciences, suggestion A way to convert rust-colored planets into places where humans can walk without a spaceship. To achieve this, researchers propose to fire asteroids from far-reaching areas of the solar system.

Mars is a desert planet, lacking oxygen and the atmosphere is very thin, preventing liquid water from accumulating on its surface. If the lack of atmospheric pressure is not addressed first, these characteristics will not be changed. If a person is not protected by the surface of Mars, they will not die from suffocation or freezing, but because their blood boils almost instantly due to the lack of atmosphere.

On Earth, atmospheric pressure is due to the total mass of the gas contained in its dense atmosphere. Here, at sea level, the pressure corresponds to 101,325 Pascals. On Mars, you barely reach 600 Pascals, which are less than 1% of Earth’s pressure. Therefore, scientists must first thicken Mars’ atmosphere to begin terraforming. Other major challenges such as extreme temperature, protection from solar radiation, and the presence of water will be addressed in subsequent stages.

All scientists exploring Mars’ terraforming arrive at the same conclusion. There is not enough material in space to transform its atmosphere and attempts to transport elements there represent unprecedented energy consumption.

Czekovsky’s solution to this problem is to bomb the planet with an asteroid. In his proposal, a large asteroid is fired directly at Hellas Planitia, a large impact crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars. According to this theory, considerable asteroid effects, including essential elements to the habitability of the planet, thickens its atmosphere while heating Mars.

But this cannot be just an asteroid. It must have abundant water and nitrogen. It quickly removes anything from the asteroid belt of the solar system, between Jupiter and Mars. Rather, large rocks must come from the Kuiper Belt, a disc of material that surrounds the outer solar system and is filled with frozen objects and primitive water.