People have long thought about converting Mars from the cold, dry planet it is today to one that would be inhabitable by humans. This notion of “terraforming” Mars has been popular for decades in science fiction and popular media—including, for example, several of the Star Trek movies and television episodes. In some sense, the idea of a terraformed Mars harkens back to the time when Percival Lowell postulated that Mars was inhabited by Martians, using giant canals to transport water from the Martian polar caps to the equator to save a dying civilization.
Is terraforming Mars feasible today? Is there enough CO2 locked up in the planet that, if it could be mobilized back into the atmosphere, would create a thicker atmosphere and a warmer environment? We have used spacecraft measurements from the last 20 years to estimate how much CO2 remains on the planet and recently published a paper in Nature Astronomy that assessed how much of the remaining CO2 can be released with present-day technology. We didn’t address what technology might be used, but Elon Musk has suggested, for example, that we could terraform Mars simply by exploding nuclear bombs over the polar caps. The heat from those would release the CO2 locked up in the polar caps back into the atmosphere, and the thicker atmosphere would produce greenhouse warming to heat the planet.
Before we reveal the answer, a bit of background: . . .
Read the entire article: Can Mars Be Terraformed? – Scientific American Blog Network