Planning missions to Mars is very difficult.
Even just getting a rover or other equipment to the red planet has endless challenges, but at least that has been successfully accomplished many times.
As we move closer to the possibility of manned missions to Mars, new hurdles need to be overcome.
One of the biggest ones is how to get people back to Earth. It takes a huge amount of fuel to send a spacecraft to Mars and land on the surface. Having to bring enough to power a trip back as well will be not just hard, but also very inefficient.
Fortunately, it might not be necessary.
According to a new paper that was recently published in the journal Science Advances, there may everything needed to make rocket fuel right there on Mars.
They estimate that about 80% of the carbon dioxide that was formerly in the Martian atmosphere is now trapped in carbon-based organic compounds right near the surface. This carbon could be extracted and converted into rocket fuel.
This is a process that has already been done many times here on Earth, so it is well understood.
In a statement, MIT geology professor Oliver Jagoutz said:
“Based on our findings on Earth, we show that similar processes likely operated on Mars, and that copious amounts of atmospheric CO2 could have transformed to methane and been sequestered in clays. This methane could still be present and maybe even used as an energy source on Mars in the future.”
The material that they believe holds all this CO2 is called smectite clay, which also exists on Earth. Scientists believe that 3.5 billion years ago, Mars had large amounts of surface water.
The coauthor of the study, Joshua Murray, who is an MIT planetary sciences PhD, explains:
“At this time in Mars’ history, we think CO2 is everywhere, in every nook and cranny, and water percolating through the rocks is full of CO2 too. These smectite clays have so much capacity to store carbon. So then we used existing knowledge of how these minerals are stored in clays on Earth, and extrapolate to say, if the Martian surface has this much clay in it, how much methane can you store in those clays?”
The answer, it seems, is a lot. While it is unlikely that the first people to travel to Mars will want to fully rely on this as a source of fuel for their return trip, it is certainly a promising option for the future of space travel to and from Mars.
Mars could serve as a ‘gas station’ for travel throughout our solar system.
If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.