MINUTE traces of specially designed greenhouse gases could heat up Mars and
make the Red Planet habitable much faster than anyone thought possible.
“On Earth these gases may be pollution, but on Mars they’d be medicine,” says
Chris McKay, who organised last week’s meeting on terraforming at the NASA Ames
Research Center in California.
No terrestrial life can survive the bitterly cold and harsh environment on
Mars. So terraformers hope to warm the planet in the same way humans are warming
Earth—by producing greenhouse gases. These gases let through most of the
Sun’s radiation, but trap the infrared wavelengths that radiate back from a…
