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Would it be impractical to just send a bunch of large asteroids to collide with Mars to get the minerals and gases we need?

ryanmercer 8y ago
Impractical? That just depends on what resources you have to tackle the problem with. Identifying candidate comets and asteroids is the first step, then coming up with some sort of propulsion system is the next step. You won't need a lot of thrust at once, you'll just need continuous thrust for weeks, months or even years. Nudge the body into an intercept with Mars and wait. Could easily take decades (if not longer) to start impacting depending on where in the system you are shopping. Good news is, comets and asteroids already come reeeeeallllllly close to the rocky planets so it's just a matter of meeting them far enough out and applying just the right amount of thrust. Bad news is, if your math isn't right... whoops you just put something on a collision course with Earth BUT you'd detect this WAYYYYYY before it would happen and you'd just apply more thrust, unless of course something happened to your propulsion system so you'd absolutely want something out there that could move fast enough to intercept, land, apply thrust. Impacting won't do much though to raise temperature or atmosphere, the atmosphere is thin enough you won't burn up much right now so you'd still need to thicken the atmosphere up some another way.
- kraig911 8y ago
  Actually found an interesting article about this. Sounds like it's just more of an energy expense with a small amount of benefit. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/16898/what-would-be-the-effect-of-increasing-the-mass-of-mars https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/16898/what-would-b...
  - unchocked 8y ago
    That link discusses bringing mass to Mars to increase its gravity. This conversation is about bringing gas to Mars to thicken its atmosphere. They’re very different ideas, and the second one is a lot more interesting than the first.
    - ryanmercer 8y ago
      Easiest way to increase the atmosphere would be to add material though, in this case comets and asteroids that had significant amounts of ices (and hopefully lots of metals, even meteoric iron would be extremely valuable on Mars as a source of easy to process metal).

ryanmercer 8y ago

Impractical? That just depends on what resources you have to tackle the problem with. Identifying candidate comets and asteroids is the first step, then coming up with some sort of propulsion system is the next step. You won't need a lot of thrust at once, you'll just need continuous thrust for weeks, months or even years. Nudge the body into an intercept with Mars and wait. Could easily take decades (if not longer) to start impacting depending on where in the system you are shopping. Good news is, comets and asteroids already come reeeeeallllllly close to the rocky planets so it's just a matter of meeting them far enough out and applying just the right amount of thrust. Bad news is, if your math isn't right... whoops you just put something on a collision course with Earth BUT you'd detect this WAYYYYYY before it would happen and you'd just apply more thrust, unless of course something happened to your propulsion system so you'd absolutely want something out there that could move fast enough to intercept, land, apply thrust. Impacting won't do much though to raise temperature or atmosphere, the atmosphere is thin enough you won't burn up much right now so you'd still need to thicken the atmosphere up some another way.

kraig911 8y ago
Actually found an interesting article about this. Sounds like it's just more of an energy expense with a small amount of benefit. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/16898/what-would-be-the-effect-of-increasing-the-mass-of-mars https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/16898/what-would-b...
- unchocked 8y ago
  That link discusses bringing mass to Mars to increase its gravity. This conversation is about bringing gas to Mars to thicken its atmosphere. They’re very different ideas, and the second one is a lot more interesting than the first.
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    Easiest way to increase the atmosphere would be to add material though, in this case comets and asteroids that had significant amounts of ices (and hopefully lots of metals, even meteoric iron would be extremely valuable on Mars as a source of easy to process metal).