NASA devises plan to restore Martian atmosphere by rebuilding its magnetic field

Data from NASA's Maven and ESA's Mars Express purports that the red planet was once a planet much like Earth, with a magnetic field shielding it from radiation and solar wind. Over 4.2 billion years ago, the magnetic field died out and the Martian atmosphere slowly deteriorated over the following 500 million years, making the planet uninhabitable; without a magnet field, there's nothing to stop solar wind and its associated radiation from stripping away atmosphere and breaking apart water into H and O. Mars hasn't been suitable for sustaining human life — but perhaps there is hope.  

This week, NASA hosted the Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop at their DC headquarters — meant, in their words, to provide the Planetary Science Division “a very long-range vision of what planetary science may look like in the future. The workshop’s scope aims to gather the leading experts in Solar System planetary science and related disciplines, together with experts in space technologies, to identify potential science goals and enabling technologies that can be implemented by the end of the 2040s and that would support the next phase of Solar System exploration.”   

Director Jim Green presented a talk, entitled “A Future Mars Environment for Science and Exploration,” in which he proposed the possibility of a human-engineered magnetic shield that would make Mars habitable by humans.  

Green's vision for the future is in “a greatly enhanced Martian atmosphere, in both pressure and temperature, that would be enough to allow significant surface liquid water and would also have a number of benefits for science and human exploration in the 2040s and beyond.”  

While he acknowledges that the idea sounds fanciful, Green is confident that it is achievable by positioning a magnetic dipole (a current loop that creates and responds to magnetic fields) at the Mars L1 Lagrange Point, deflecting solar wind in the same way as a natural magnetic field.   

“This new research is coming about due to the application of full plasma physics codes and laboratory experiments. In the future, it is quite possible that an inflatable structure(s) can generate a magnetic dipole field at a level of perhaps 1 or 2 Tesla (or 10,000 to 20,000 Gauss) as an active shield against the solar wind,” Green said.  

To test their ideas, the research team (made up of scientists from Ames Research Center, the University of Colorado, Princeton University, the Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) conducted simulations using the artificial magnetosphere they proposed, which would cause the atmosphere to gradually thicken over time, eventually melting the carbon-dioxide ice and causing the water ice in the polar caps to melt. This would restore 1/7 of the oceans on Mars.  

“Much like Earth, an enhanced atmosphere would allow larger landed mass of equipment to the surface, shield against most cosmic and solar particle radiation, extend the ability for oxygen extraction, and provide 'open-air' greenhouses to exist for plant production, just to name a few. These new conditions on Mars would allow human explorers and researchers to study the planet in much greater detail and enable a truly profound understanding of the habitability of this planet. If this can be achieved in a lifetime, the colonization of Mars would not be far away,” Green says.   

His full lecture is available here.