Science: A new study suggests that Martian soil could be recreated on Mars using artificially engineered dust particles that would be harvested from the Red Planet itself, raising the temperature by more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 30 degrees Celsius). Currently, the average temperature on the surface of Mars is minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 60 degrees Celsius), and the atmospheric pressure is just 6 to 7 millibars, compared to 1,013 millibars at sea level on Earth. Mars has a thin unbreathable atmosphere, composed mostly of carbon dioxide, and the planet’s water is locked up as ice in the polar caps and in subsurface layers of ice found mostly at high and mid-latitudes.
So, as things stand, Mars is not hospitable to human life. But interplanetary explorers dream of making it habitable by artificially altering conditions on the Red Planet, a process known as terraforming. Mars’ natural greenhouse effect warms the planet by only about 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius), so the first step to terraforming Mars is to increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Various methods have been proposed, ranging from the impractical — slamming asteroids and comets into the surface to release water vapor and other warming gases — to the merely scary, such as building giant factories that extract CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons). Since fluorine is rare on Mars, making CFCs on the Red Planet would require importing about 100,000 million tons from Earth
