Images from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft strongly suggest the Red Planet was once balmy and inviting— and they are stoking the imaginations of scientists who dream of making it so again. Margarita Marinova, an aerospace engineering graduate student at MIT, has even worked out some key details of how to transform Mars into a habitable world.
Elevation map shows blue lowlands where a future Mars ocean might collect. Photo by Mola Science Team/NASA-GSFC
To thaw the frigid planet, Marinova and her colleagues sought the perfect greenhouse gas— one that is potent, benign, and easy to manufacture. They hit on perfluorocarbons, simple compounds of carbon and fluorine. These molecules seem safe to living things, they won't harm the ozone layer, and in the right combination they are a thousand times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat. Just a few parts per million of perfluorocarbons in the air should ...
