Now, as it has been a long time, Mars, or the Red Planet, has been the centerpiece of human colonization beyond Earth. It is close to Earth, it has abundant sunlight, and water is caught in the ice, making it a perfect planet for colonization. The greatest problem is the thin atmosphere of Mars. Innovators are now working on new ways to resolve this: using nanoparticles to warm the planet and, therefore, increase the thickness of the atmosphere.
Nanorods of small size are injected into the Mars atmosphere, when accelerated through the greenhouse effect, then melt the surface ice, releasing CO2 in the solid form thus increasing atmospheric pressure tremendously. According to Science Advances, a study published on extremely minute nanorods that are injected into the Martian atmosphere may raise temperatures by accelerating the greenhouse effect and then melting surface ice. This will release CO2 locked in solid form enormously increasing atmospheric pressure.
The reason Mars lost its atmosphere is that it was ripped away by solar winds since Mars lacks a magnetic field. Previous attempts to thicken the Martian atmosphere involved the importation of very high quantities of resources, including greenhouse gases, not easily findable on Mars. With the present technology, the voyage to Mars takes around nine months, and initial colonies are likely to have limited supplies since, under the spacecraft, there is very little space. This makes the success of these settlements depend on the usage of materials that are already present on Mars.
Powder analysis from Mars suggests that the material there is far richer in minerals. Now, scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom have built a model that indicates if engineers can release this mineral-rich dust into an aerosol in the Martian atmosphere it can help heat the planet. Conor Boland is a material scientist at the University of Sussex. “Designing new Martian aerosol material shows this to be a very clever piece of work,” he told the Science Media Centre.
“Well, in this story, you have these engineered dust particles, which are bright aluminum or iron nanorods, which are about nine micrometers long,” said Edwin Kite, a planetary scientist with the University of Chicago and another co-author on the research paper. “When they’re released into the Martian atmosphere, they’re designed to trap heat and forward-scatter sunlight.”. The models suggested that injecting about 30 liters of nanorods per second could increase Mars’ temperature by over 30 Kelvin, melting subsurface ice, and eventually increasing atmospheric pressure. “This would be an important step toward allowing a photosynthetic biosphere on Mars,” Kite added.
Boland said this could make Mars colonization more sustainable. He had already pointed out how nanomaterials of the size illustrated in Kite’s models could be produced sustainably by a future Mars colony. He also pointed to potential hurdles, though, one being the nuisance dust poses for machinery, he cited past issues with lunar dust and the Curiosity rover on Mars.
Kite said much would need to be shown experimentally, from the long-term behavior of the nanorods in the atmosphere to the nitty-gritty of how to manufacture the engineered dust. Crucially, the output from the models Kite described would not make Mars immediately habitable. “The resulting atmosphere would still be much thinner than Earth’s,” Kite said. However, this shows the potential that several converging technologies could, in the end, lead to a successful terraform.
Future synthetic biology approaches may utilize engineered microorganisms able to live under these warmer conditions for helping to produce oxygen, potentially setting a hospitable environment for humans in the first extraterrestrial human settlement being realized.
In the study, “Feasibility of keeping Mars warm with nanoparticles,” experimental results on the potential of novel solutions are reported to make Mars, in some sense, habitable, even if full habitability is nothing more than a very distant perspective. In this regard, this research paves the way for human interplanetary colonization.