Scientists discover way to restore water to Mars using dust

The search for life on Mars, past or present, continues, and humanity making the Red Planet hospitable has been talked about for years now among the scientific community.

However, as you might expect, speaking about moving to Mars and actually making it a liveable place are two very different things.

Now, a new study has been released which looks into one possible way of making Mars suitable for human life.

Various ideas of raising the temperature on the surface from around -65 degrees centigrade have been floated before, but many of them would have required raw material to have been transported from Earth – which would have proven an exorbitantly expensive task.

However, Edwin Kite and colleagues at the University of Chicago in Illinois, have put forward one idea which they believe could raise the temperature on Mars by 30 degrees much more quickly and more cheaply than other methods.

This process is called terraforming, and would essentially involve pumping dust made by engineers into Mars’s atmosphere.

Is this the key to sustaining human life on Mars?iStock

According to the paper published in Science Advances this week, the dust would be made of extremely small metal rods measuring nine millionths of a metre long – which is small enough to reflect the heat and keep it within the atmosphere.

As the research argues, this could raise the temperature in such a way that the water currently stored in the form of ice below the surface of Mars could then melt during Mars’s summer.

It’s another fascinating update as developments around Mars continue to be made, and it comes after NASA’s Curiosity rover made an accidental discovery that is leaving experts stunned.

The exploratory device has been roaming Mount Sharp – a mountain which rises about 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometres) above the floor of Gale Crater, just south of the Martian equator – since September 2014. But on 30 May of this year, it chanced upon an extraordinary find by driving over a rock.

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