14 May 2011

Another Step Closer to Terra-forming Mars

From: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mro-co2-ice&sc=emailfriend
Radar soundings from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have identified huge dry ice deposits under the Red Planet's surface totaling roughly 10,000 cubic kilometers. ..More importantly to planetary scientists, that dry ice—solid carbon dioxide—is enough to change the climate of Mars. If all that CO2 were released as gas, as it may well have been in the past, it would nearly double the mass of the Martian atmosphere, increasing pressures across the planet and making Mars more hospitable to patches of liquidwater.

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