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Old 07-30-2019, 10:15 AM   #6
Anthony
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
Default Re: Aerogel martian habitats.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
Might as well condense Venus' atmosphere and transport that to Mars. Two terraformings for the price of one.

Comets are around 5% CO2. At least you want the water, too. If I'm reading the paper right, you need 3.6e18 tons of CO2 for a 1 bar atmosphere
You can turn water into oxygen too (and the hydrogen will escape fast enough), and on the scale we're looking at it isn't all that much more difficult than converting CO2.

Assuming the comets are hitting Mars at 10 km/sec (about the low end of velocities for a transfer orbit from the Kuiper belt), and our total mass is about 100 tons per square meter (of which about 30 turns into atmosphere) the total is 5e+12J/m^2. If you keep the temperature low enough for liquid water, you can eliminate heat at maybe 250W/m^2, more if you put up a sun shade. This gives a time to eliminate the waste heat of our collision product of 2e+10s or 634 years. That's super fast by geological standards, and honestly we'll probably need a lot more mass because of losses and reactions with the chemistry of Mars.
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