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An absolutely bonkers plan to give Mars an artificial magnetosphere:
As the study points out, if you want a good planetary magnetic field, what you really need is a strong flow of charged particles, either within the planet or around the planet. Since the former isn't a great option for Mars, the team looks at the latter. It turns out you can create a ring of charged particles around Mars, thanks to its moon Phobos.
Phobos is the larger of the two Martian moons, and it orbits the planet quite closely—so closely that it makes a trip around Mars every eight hours. So the team proposes using Phobos by ionizing particles from its surface, then accelerating them so they create a plasma torus along the orbit of Phobos. This would create a magnetic field strong enough to protect a terraformed Mars.
It's a bold plan, and while it seems achievable, the engineering hurdles would be significant. But as the authors point out, this is the time for ideas. Start thinking about the problems we need to solve, and how we can solve them, so when humanity does reach Mars, we will be ready to put the best ideas to the test.
Simple solution, really. It's the dependencies that are a bear...
Journal Reference:
R. A. Bamford, B. J. Kelletta, J. L. Green, et al How to create an artificial magnetosphere for Mars How to create an artificial magnetosphere for Mars
(DOI: doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2021.09.023https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2021.09.023
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 26 2021, @07:26AM
Yes and when you're in orbit, with our current tech levels you can set artificial gravity to 1G, Mars G, Moon G, etc and take all the guesswork out of the picture and actually start answering those questions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gravity [wikipedia.org]
You can't do that on Mars.
But no, instead of spending money and time doing actual science to figure out useful stuff like that which will be useful for many generations (e.g. if we build space colonies and need to reduce artificial gravity to cut costs in some places), they're spending time and money on "let's go to Mars before we're scientifically ready".
There's some centrifuge stuff on the ISS but it's quite a recent thing and not very big: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/Spinning_Science_MVP_Arrives_At_ISS/ [nasa.gov]
The original one was cancelled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Module [wikipedia.org]
No money for that but there was money for many trips to Hawaii[1] to answer questions that have mostly been answered by the US nuclear submarine bunch.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HI-SEAS [wikipedia.org]