Bad News for Terraformers: Periodic Bursts Of Solar Radiation Destroy The Martian Atmosphere

Or some way to revitalize a planetary magnetic field.

It would be an interesting problem to look into.

or simply retrofit a couple of sites on the surface to latch rockets and start a rotaion period that could then hopefully create a magnetic feild big enough yet as strong as earths, mabye then that martian air maker isnt so stupid...

Put our nuclear waste into the core. The radiation would heat the core, creating a magnetic field. Of course, that would take a bit more uranium than we have

It's alright, I was cool with domed martian cities anyway.

@Musicman24286

Maybe put a reactor on the planet that vents its waste heat down into the planet. if you are going to terraform to inhabit you will need the energy for a lot of things.

Don't you mean Doomed?

Humans can't live on mars. But robots can do everything so that's ok.

Musicman, if we try to fill the core of the planet with nuclear waste, we might just make a more lethal environment. I think we would need the core to be solid, surrounded by liquid metal to create magnetism.

I think Mars has no real geologic activity. You would probably need to do something along the lines of that "journey to the center of the earth" movie to get the core heated up again. There goes my future vacation home. :p

Do these solar waves only attack Mars? That doesn't seem fair at all. x) I thought the waves would be random. Maybe we should create an artificial magnetic field with robots using the resources on Mars.

are there big enough electro magnets to create an artificial magnetic field?

An electro magnet of that size would probably prove highly impractical if not nearly impossible. And what would happen if the artificial magnetic field failed. One of these double solar waves could sneak in and make a lethal hit.

This may be good news, and bring terraforming to Mars within a life time. If double winds are the big cause of loss of atmosphere to mars then we simply block or reduce them. This article also implies that an atmosphere is constantly replenishing. That’s good news for developing a thicker atmosphere. There several ways to teraform the atmosphere, one is a collision with an astoryed to create a new faster dipole spin with Mars and a new moon. Another is to bulk up its existing moon with matter from other moons. A greater dipole will create a better internal dynamo within Mars to protect, and thicken its atmosphere. However, both methods take a long time to do. Another approach is a man made dynamo, near the Sun, with a Mars synchronous orbit. Although this would be large, it would not need to be the size of a small moon. The dynamo would only need to be strong enough to reduce the strength of the solar winds. Close to the sun, a small durable, solar array would power it. Safe within the weak winds of the contrail of the dynamo Mars atmosphere would thicken and become livable.

Strangely enough, the earth apparently didn't have a magnetic field at dirst -- or so I've read. There was just a reference in Google news discussing that. It has been around for longer than originally thought, but only for about 3.5 billion years :)

why not concentrate first on getting there, then work on terraforming the place. i was thinking of a dyson sphere of little 1 inch big magnets in high orbit, the chaos from it should be enough to keep the solar wind at bay but missions would have to be made to retrieve the magnets that clump togethor. failing that and having a larger time to do something i was also thinking of first increasing the size of mars by bringing half of the ateroid belt to mars and then lowering them onto the surface, then building a giant core heater that would basically take thermal energy directly from the sun and channel it into the center of the now massively bigger mars thus giving it a core, speed it up and bam you have a magnetosphere.

failing that we could at the very least build a massive magnetic coil on the surface whenever we knew that something like that was going to hit. think an electromagnet powered by 2 years of the sun's energy output. you could probably move the entire planet from the sheer amount of magnetic force you'd create. that or send the coil to space.

this is becoming more fun than anything i have thought about in the last week.

What Mars needs is greater mass. That's fortunately parked not too far away in the form of asteroids. By carefully and systematically decelerating asteroids to collide with Mars, you can increase its overall mass until it's core becomes molten, thereby creating the necessary magnetic field to protect from the solar wind. It would also allow for a thicker atmosphere. This process would likely take hundreds of years, but it's an engineering problem only.

The air is striped away over the corse of billions of years. Why would understanding that a little better cause terraforming to not work? Just how long do you think we will need untill we have the ablility to manipulate a planatary magnetic field, lets say we terafor mars and we loose 1% every 50 million years big friggen deal we could replace it at that rate.

Put Dick Cheney into Mars' core.

Probably wouldn't heat it up, but that's not really the point...

If you were going to haul the asteroid belt there anyways, why not just shotgun the planet with them. Kick up a huge global cloud (read atmosphere).

Seriously, though, you don't need an atmosphere on Mars. Planets are big, and environmental change is massively difficult (think about how singlemindedly man has worked to burn fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution to MAYBE shift the climate a little).

Instead, your new plant just needs to be inhabited in closed systems. Man already has to pretty much master closed systems to send people elsewhere ni our universe to bigin with, so why not keep your habitations closed and subterrestrial?

People forget that while man does changes his environment, he does not rewrite his environment, but instead adapts in new ways to it.

Crashing asteroids into Mars to beef it up to the mass, say, of the Earth would heat it up to the point that its surface might take hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years to cool down enough to where you could stand on it.

Give it a few more millions of years to develop soil...

if mars was covered in kudzu(read: dense vegetation), then a double solar wave would just release water vapor from the plants, making atmosphere/clouds, no?
ok here's the plan: pick out where you want your north and south poles, build nuclear power plants there, and use them to power gigantic electromagnetic coils, properly polarized so they are attracting to each other. otherwise, one of them flips and destroys one of your nuclear power plants, releasing radioactive materials into the environment which in turn speed up the evolution of martian life.
why yes i do realize that this is highly impractical, when we have better things to dedicate our time and resources on.
but i am still willing to go to mars. now i know to bring lots of magnets on the trip, along with my seeds and a female companion with whom to produce the first martian babies.

Mars kind of needs tectonic movement as well. I say we fill it with billions upon billions of self-replicating genetically engineered bugs highly sensitive to solar waves that, when hit by them, explode into a cloud of oxygen/nitrogen/co2, etc. The babies can have UV shields that erode away when they get mature enough to release oxygen. Kind of like Red Planet movie heh.

Why not just create a massive multiple layered magnet generator which partially fuels itself very its own magnetic charge as well as using solar panels while looking into transporting energy via teleportation which scientists have proven possible or more specifically .. haven't been able to prove impossible.. then slowly after times .. then eventually look into the compound of the rock and soil and see if you can make something that changes the compound of it to release bring a hell of a lot of inanimate objects with oxygen particles inside and chemically react with something else.. maybe even something that's on the mars surface to release the oxygen

Why not just create a massive multiple layered magnet generator which partially fuels itself very its own magnetic charge as well as using solar panels while looking into transporting energy via teleportation which scientists have proven possible or more specifically .. haven't been able to prove impossible.. then slowly after times .. then eventually look into the compound of the rock and soil and see if you can make something that changes the compound of it to release bring a hell of a lot of inanimate objects with oxygen particles inside and chemically react with something else.. maybe even something that's on the mars surface to release the oxygen

to be honest the better option for terraforming would be Venus, if we could precipitate the carbon out of the atmosphere there it would drop the planetary temperature to a survivable range.

also we know that it can hold a dense atmosphere, most likely we would need to shield our tech against a powerfull magnetic field on that world.

why not put some satellites with magnetic fields in geosynchronous orbit over mars to protect it long enough for a permanent solution. also i think no one could survive on Venus even if we got rid of the toxic atmosphere we would have to shield the heat from getting to Venuses surface.

well that would work if you had a liquid mantle. just make them around the equator and turn them on and off to make the mantle spin.

they need to find a way to generate mars quakes to cause friction to heat the core and jump-start it. Not in our life time. (imposible with today's tech.) there is aslo a problem that mars' atomsphere is so thin that there isnt hardly any atomspheric preassure(a cup of water on the surface of Mars would boil away into space.) That means they need to find some war to increase atomhperic pressure too.

I've heard before that Mars just doesn't have the mass to keep its core molten and its fluid magnet rotating to generate a planetary protection field, and I've heard the the thoughts about crashing asteroids into it to increase its mass. However, considering that its about 1/3 the size of earth, it would require an enormous amount of mass to bring it on par with our planet, and it would completely destroy the current surface of Mars and any useful evidence we might gain from its study, therefore I can not advocate that solution.
What if instead of bombarding Mars we used asteroids to build it a bigger moon? Our own moon has the effect of tugging at the Earth and keeping tectonic activity going, would it not have the same effect on Mars? Would it be enough to jump-start the core? Would the combined mass of a Mars/moon system shift the orbit and send it closer to Earth for shorter travel time?
Thoughts to ponder.

if we do build a new moon for Mars, how will we stabilize its orbit and prevent it from smashing into Mars?

boy. that would be tough on living conditions.

Beecher Bowers
www.beecherbowers.com