Inspired by this thread, I have a GQ for the experts. Could an impact like this give us a jumpstart on terraforming Mars?
Evidently it has water. Could a major climate change caused by such an impact warm it up, melt the ice, and give life a chance?
Ooh! My thread was inspiring! Thanks, I’m here all week.
It’s a pretty tiny asteroid (which seems like an oxymoron to me – aren’t asteroids ginormous monstrosities, mini-planets? Guess not). It’s about the size of a thirty-story building or two. OK, a thirty-story sphere. If it were completely made of ice, it wouldn’t affect the water or energy balance much. Which is unfortunate – I’d like to see fireworks on that scale (and at .5 AU, its about the right distance to not worry about local effects).
squeegee - Asteroids range in size from continents to dust grains.
The largest is Ceres Ceres (dwarf planet) - Wikipedia whch though traditionally classified as an asteroid is now classifed as a minor or dwarf planet.
The smallest? Well how small can dust get?
but if it kicks up enough dust couldn’t it create a greenhouse atmosphere? wouldn’t that have some residual effect?
Rank speculation re dust:
a) Mars has little atmosphere to begin with, so I’m not sure how well a dust as a heat trap would work.
b) Mars’ gravity is less than Earth’s, so any dust kicked up would stay aloft longer. Longer than what, I’m not sure: since there’s little atmosphere, I’d think dust would still tend to settle pretty quickly, gravity issues aside.
Mars regularly has humongous sand storms, so I’m not sure this would be any different (or greater) in effect by comparison.
Sure, it’ll have an effect, and will shorten the terraforming effort. Instead of taking five hundred years, it’ll take four hundred and ninety eight years.
Read “The Cold and the Dark” by Ehrlich, Sagan, Kennedy, Roberts. Martian sandstorms provided interesting data on the effect that dust in the air has on climate. The bottom line IIRC is that high-atmosphere dust bounces solar heat back into space and underneath the dust it’s much colder that it would have been without the dust.
If it hit Mars with enough force to stir up some volcanic activity (i.e. several years of spewing out gases) then you’d see a jumpstart, or if it melted significant portions of one of the polar ice caps, but odds are, it’ll just make things worse from a greenhouse standpoint.