Terraforming Mars Essay

899 Words2 Pages

Zachary Watson

Mrs. Willet

Astronomy

3/5/13

Terraforming Mars

Terraforming Mars is the process of making mars hospitable to human life and colonizing a safe environment for people to live. Mars, in retrospect, is the most earth-like planet that resides in our solar system, therefore it is the best planet amongst those around earth for us to attempt to inhabit. I would choose to use a timeline of one thousand years to complete the inhabitation process. Most scientist’s timeline is between one hundred and one hundred thousand years, I believe one hundred is much too short and we would be moving to fast and possibly make a mistake along the way. One hundred thousand on the other hand is too long, earths population would be far too high and we would need another environment sooner. Mars has a good amount of resources available for us to use if we make it to mars, these include oxygen, nitrogen, and water.

In order to get humans to Mars, we would obviously fly there in a spacecraft, this spacecraft would be extremely large because it will serve as home to people for the entirety of the journey. The spacecraft would be made up of an amalgamation of other spacecrafts all connected to form one, and represent a human environment, somewhat like a flying house, looking like boxes practically stacked on top of each other and continually getting smaller, like a wedding cake. Each box represents a “floor” in the “house”, the bottom and largest floor would be the living quarters. We would need a hearty amount of fuel to make it to Mars, nuclear thermal would be the best choice. The liquid hydrogen would be heated to a very high temperature in a nuclear reactor, and would expand through the nozzle of the rocket to make thrust...

... middle of paper ...

... The Mars Global Surveyor was sent as an orbiter to fly around Mars, it took pictures and was able to point out the annual changes in the cycle of Mars, it also pointed out some new craters. The Odyssey monitored the atmospheric and radiation data of Mars. Spirit was a rover that discovered direct evidence of hydrogen on Mars. The Opportunity rover landed shortly after Spirit , and it found a great amount of hematite in its landing site crater.

We obviously could not breathe on Mars, we would need at least a small supplement of oxygen through some type of a mask. We would need to worry about radiation, although the soil would shield heavy amounts from doing too much harm. It will be extremely exciting to see the future humans can make happen regarding terraforming Mars and hopefully in about one thousand years humans will be riding bicycles on the Red Planet.

Open Document