Headed to Mars? Pack Some Aerogel?You Know, for Terraforming

Could an insulating material create a solid-state greenhouse effect warm enough to make Mars habitable? A temperature increase of 50 degrees K.1 “The fact that it’s smoky means that it’s scattering the light, but the bulk of the light is getting through,” Wordsworth says. The limit is on the materials science, not on the basic theory.”Then they fed their measurements of temperature change into a computer model that included Martian regolith— “with the Martian seasonal cycle, atmospheric pressure, and the rest of it to extrapolate our results,” Wordsworth says. If you’re doing something like just growing algae on the surface, it could literally just be a surface layer.”Maybe most importantly, the warming is fast—way faster than the hundreds, perhaps thousands of years it could take to either liberate CO2 on Mars (if it’s there at all) or to synthesize and emit super-greenhouse gases to the job. As we know from Earth, this is an effective way to warm a planet.”Last year researchers released an analysis of Mars data that suggested the planet had lost most of its CO2, that there wasn’t enough left to induce natural greenhouse warming.