Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: thebrain13 on 16/11/2006 15:15:40
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Just wondering, how practical would it be for humans to move the orbit of mars closer to the sun. Say for example Russia and the usa just started blasting it with a huge barrage of nuclear weapons, slowing the orbit down, and making it ultimately orbit closer. I wonder if we could get it to orbit clse enough so the temperature is roughly equivalent to earths.
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No the amount of energy stored due to its rotation about the Sun is vastly greater than any additions that could be made.
If its orbit was disturbed in would impact on all the nearby planets in complex ways!
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Why would we want to do that anyway ?...
Best to wait for the sun to expand and make it more habitable then...cos we'll probably need it then !!
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Sounds like a "challenging" problem; but to the extent we might consider it solvable, the best idea might be to arrange a fleet of asteroids to zip by it repeatedly, on the "back" side, causing Mars to receive, over a long period of time, gravitational tugs, which would eventually cause it to slip into a lower orbit. Of course, the asteroids would have to be somehow assmebled and directed, possibly requiring further dynamic manipulations of various kinds, which could get to be a messy problem. But the idea is not to move the large object directly, but to move little objects first, and get them to move the big one. All things considered, such a project likely would require thousands of years of orbital manipulations.
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Instead of moving Mars, maybe it would be more manageable to manipulate Mars' climate directly. E.g., conspire to alter its atmosphere so as to cause it to be heavier and more heat-trapping.
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You would need to deliver a large amount of energy over a long period of time and would probably destroy the planet after delivering only a tiny fraction of what would be required to move it.
It would be millions of times easier to warm up Mars and melt all its frozen water.
The KT impact moved the earth by a tiny fraction and that delivered 100milion megatons of energy to the earth (5 billion Hiroshima's ?) creating an earthquake of 12.8.
Also if we could move mars wouldn't it have an effect on the angular momentum of everything else in the solar system,
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I think as has been mentioned recently in the news the easiest way of doing it would be with giant orbiting mirrors, doing the same thing as moving mars closer to the sun, but only having to move a few hundred thousand tonnes of aluminised mylar instead of several billion billion tonnes of mars.
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In fact if you had a whole lot of large plane mirrors spinning at half the speed they were orbiting Mars it would all work quite nicely.
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Hi dave I read the story your talking about NASA idea of using ballons in respect to heating up a small surface area of the planet making it more hospitable to reside on
http://space.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn10573&feedId=online-news_rss20