New method to initiate terraforming of Mars?

[Ags]

According to the following reference, a few tons of infalling space dust cause the Martian clouds: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190617125120.htm. These clouds can boost local surface temperatures by up to 20 Kelvin. Could we boost this effect by mass driving crushed dust from Phobos into the Mars atmosphere? 10 tons a day would already be a factor of 4 increase.

All Mars terraforming strategies I know of first increase Mars temperature. That liberates the frozen CO2 deposits and leads to a positive feedback warming cycle as well as thickening the atmosphere. Regarding water, Mars has plenty, enough to cover one third of the planet in 100m of water. Atmospheric erosion is an issue - over geologic timescales. Needing to build an artificial magnetic field in the next 100,000 years doesn't sound like a big problem.

Edited July 18, 2019 by Ags

[Dave Lloyd]

Fascinating stuff. Similar to Carl Sagans idea to seed Venus' atmosphere with photosynthetic microbes. 

[Ags]

My initial idea was to use a "clean" nuke (like the Tsar Bomba, very big but relatively low fallout) to eject a large mass of debris into low Mars orbit which would then trickle into the atmosphere over decades. But that would make Low Mars Orbit a very hazardous environment (micrometeorites), so I felt something more controlled like a mass driver shooting pellets of compacted Phobos dust into a defined insertion orbit would be required. Phobos's escape velocity is only 40kmh and it's orbital speed is only 2.1 km per second. As a rough guess, a mass driver launching pellets at 1km per sec in the other direction (Mach 3) should be enough to put the pellet into an elliptical orbit that impacts Mars. The .220 Swift cartridge for example leaves the rifle barrel at 1250 meters per second, so Mach 3 for a mass driver doesn't sound crazy.

Because we are shooting dust, possibly the mass driver could actually be like an ion drive accelerating electrically charged dust particles?

Another reason to not nuke Phobos is if the atmosphere does not respond as expected to the additional dust, the mass driver can be switched off or modulated, but nuking is irreversible.

Edited July 19, 2019 by Ags