Could Comets Teach Us how to Terraform Mars?
The atmosphere of Mars, composed of a thin layer of carbon dioxide, provides a significant challenge in colonizing the Red Planet. Without breathable oxygen in the atmosphere, Mars colonists will forever be trapped indoors, or within the confines of spacesuits. A new process developed at Caltech, inspired by comets, may hold the secret to transforming carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into breathable oxygen.
A ready supply of oxygen is vital to human spaceflight, and the gaseous, molecular oxygen we breath in the atmosphere is composed of pairs of atoms of oxygen, called O2. Carbon dioxide, CO2, is made up from two atoms of oxygen on opposite sides of a carbon atom.
“[W]e thought it would be impossible to combine the two oxygen atoms of a CO2 molecule together because CO2 is a linear molecule, and you would have to bend the molecule severely for it to work. You’re doing something really drastic to the molecule,” Konstantinos Giapis, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech, stated.
Astronomers knew that molecular oxygen may be found in the tails of comets, although the exact mechanism which formed the gas remained a matter of debate. Giapis and his team examined the question, proposing an unknown chemical process might be at work.
