MARS

COLONIZATION
THESIS
Let’s Dig Deeper…..
Certificate
It is to certify that the Colonization of Mars is submitted
by Shreyas Sinha under the supervision of Avishek sir in
the academic year 2024.

Sign of teacher
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my gratitude towards all
who helped me in completing this project.
Furthermore, I would also like to thank my
English teacher Avishek sir who helped me in
completing this project with his valuable
guidance and ideas.

I would like to give special thanks to my

parents and my friends because without their
suggestions and support, it was not easy to
complete this project
INTRODUCTION
Mars is the fourth planet and the furthest
terrestrial planet from the Sun. The reddish
color of its surface is due to finely grained
iron(III) oxide dust in the soil, giving it the
nickname "the Red Planet".
Index

● About Mars

● Moons of Mars

● Comparison of Earth and Mars

● Terraforming Mars

● Its Atmosphere

● Creating biosphere

● Current Mars Missions

● Reusable Rockets
About Mars
Mars is named after the greek god of
War Ares.
Mars is one of the most explored bodies in our solar system,
and it's the only planet where we've sent rovers to roam the
alien landscape. NASA missions have found lots of evidence
that Mars was much wetter and warmer, with a thicker
atmosphere, billions of years ago.

Namesake : Mars was named by the Romans for their god of

war because its reddish color was reminiscent of blood. The
Egyptians called it "Her Desher," meaning "the red one.“

Potential for life : Scientists don't expect to find living things

currently thriving on Mars. Instead, they're looking for signs of
life that existed long ago, when Mars was warmer and covered
with water.
Size and Distance : With a radius of 2,106 miles (3,390
kilometers), Mars is about half the size of Earth. From an
average distance of 142 million miles (228 million kilometers),
Mars is 1.5 astronomical units away from the Sun. One
astronomical unit (abbreviated as AU), is the distance from the
Sun to Earth. From this distance, it takes sunlight 13 minutes to
travel from the Sun to Mars.

Orbit and Rotation : As Mars orbits the Sun, it completes one

rotation every 24.6 hours, which is very similar to one day on
Earth (23.9 hours). Martian days are called sols – short for
"solar day." A year on Mars lasts 669.6 sols, which is the same
as 687 Earth days.

Seasons in Mars : Mars has distinct seasons, but they last

longer than seasons here on Earth since Mars takes longer to
orbit the Sun (because it's farther away). And while here on
Earth the seasons are evenly spread over the year, lasting 3
Moons of Mars :-
Mars has two small moons, Phobos and Deimos, that may be
captured asteroids. They're potato-shaped because they have
too little mass for gravity to make them spherical.

The moons get their names from the horses that pulled the
chariot of the Greek god of war, Ares.

- Phobos
- Deimos
 Earth Mars
Distance from the sun 14.1 million Km 222.77 million Km
Atmosphere 78% Nitrogen 95% Carbon Dioxide
21% Oxygen 3% Nitrogen
0.9% Argon 1.6% Argon
0.04% Carbon Dioxide 0.2% Oxygen

Temperature 185 – 331 K ( -88 to 52 133 – 293 K ( -190 to 20

C) C)
Mean : 287 K ( 14 C) Mean : 210 K ( -63 C)

Length of the solar day 24 H 24 H 40 min

Length of the year 365.25 Days 687 Days
Axial tilt 23.4 25.2
Atmospheric pressure 1 ATM 0.0060 ATM
 Terraforming Mars

● Mars is a disappointing
hellhole lacking practically
everything we need to stay
alive.
● It looks like we'll only ever
have small crews spend a
miserable time hidden
underground.
● Except, we could terraform
it into a green new world.
● But to solve the planet's
problems, we first need
to make it worse and turn
Mars is dry and has no soil to grow anything.
It's atmosphere is too thin to breathe or
protect from radiation, giving you a high risk
of cancer.
So to turn into a new home for humanity, we
have to give it a proper atmosphere, similar to
Earth's.

It should be made of 21% oxygen, 79%

nitrogen and a tiny bit of CO2, at an average
temperature of 14°C and under 1 bar of
pressure.
We have to create oceans and rivers and then
the ground has to be weathered into fertile
soil to host living things.

It's difficult.

But a big laser makes it a lot easier.

Challenge 1 : The Atmosphere

● Mars is a dry, barren wasteland.

● Luckily, a sizable portion of water
is frozen in deep reservoirs and in the
polar ice caps, enough to create a very
shallow ocean.
● Enormous amounts of oxygen are
bound as minerals in the Martian rocks,
like the oxygen in iron oxides that
give the planet it's rust-red colour as
well as CO2 in carbonates.
● To free these gases, we need to
reverse the reactions that lock them
away by using thermolysis, which occurs
at temperatures as high as on the
surface of the Sun.
The best way to do that would be to put lasers
in orbit aiming their beams down on Mars.

The most powerful laser today is the ELI-NP,

able to produce 10 petawatts of power, for a
trillionth of a second.
To melt Mars we need a laser twice as
powerful, that runs continuously.

The easiest way is to use a solar-pumped laser,

that can be powered directly with sunlight.
At its core are metal-infused glass rods that
absorb energy and release it as a laser beam.
If we buld an array of mirrors in space, about
33 times the size of India, we can focus enough
sunlight onto them to melt Mars.

As the lasers hit the surface, about 750 Kg

oxygen and some CO2 emerge from every
cubic metre of rock melted.
After they pass, the ground cools quickly.
A strange snow falls : ashes from all the
elements that solidify as they cool down, like
silicon and iron.
Mars is still a cold planet at this point.

A happy side effect of this inferno is that all the

water in the polar ice caps and even deep
underground rises into the sky as hot steam,
forming clouds that rain down over the entire
planet.

They would wash out the nastier gases from

the atmosphere like chlorine, and carry away
harmful elements that accumulated on the
surface.
In the end, they would form shallow oceans,
saltier than on Earth.

We're not done though.

• The resulting atmosphere is nearly 100%
oxygen and only 0.2 bar.
• Its hard to breath and very flammable.
• To make it similar to Earth and a lot safer, we
need to add a lot of nitrogen, which Mars is
sadly lacking.
• We have to import it.
• The ideal source is Titan, a large moon of
Saturn, covered in a thick atmosphere that's
almost entirely nitrogen.
• We just have to move 3000 trillion tons from
the outer solar system to mars.
• While that's not easy, it is doable.
• To process that much of Titan's atmosphere,
we have to construct giant automated
factories, on its surface powered by our
lasers to suck in the atmosphere and
compress it into a liquid.
• This gets pumped into bullet-shaped
tanks, which a mass driver shoots all the way
to the red planet, where they explode and
mix with the oxygen.
• We’ve already been able to send individual
missions to Saturn in just a few years.
• With enough resources, it should be possible
to complete the task within 2 generations.
• If the liberated CO2 isn't enough to warm it
up to temperatures we can stand, we just
add some super greenhouse gases.
• Mars at this point resembles a black marble
from all the cooling lava, spotted with
growing oceans and red patches where the
old surface remains untouched.
• It's still a wasteland, no better than a
desert on Earth.
• We need to fill it with life.
 Challenge 2 : The Biosphere
• Installing a biosphere on a new planet
is very difficult.
• Unexpected interactions between
species or sudden diseases
can destabilize it to the point of
collapse.
• We would probably begin by seeding
our young oceans with phytoplankton.
• Without competition, it would bloom
rapidly, filling up the oceans to
become the bottom of an aquatic food
chain.
• They can be followed by tiny
zooplankton, then by fish.
• If things go well, life in the oceans will
• Life on land is harder.
• Plants need nutrient-filled ground to sink their
roots into.
• But most of the surface is the congealed remains
of lava and ashes.
• Turning our laser on and off in rapid succession
would cause the ground to quickly heat up and
contract, which breaks it into smaller and smaller
pieces.
• Add a bit of water, and you get a sort of dark
mud.
• Into this mud, we can mix fungi and nitrogen-
fixing bacteria. They’re able to absorb nitrogen
and convert it into nitrate compounds to feed
plants.
• The first plants we want to bring are native to
volcanic islands on Earth, since they are perfectly
suited to the laser-blasted Martian landscape.
• Eventually, the enriched mud becomes the
foundation for grasslands and forests.
• In Mars’ lower gravity, trees can become very
tall very fast.
• Their roots gather the nutrients they need and
then dig deeper to turn more rocks into soil,
forming a self-sustaining ecosystem.
• At this point we can slowly introduce more
plant varieties, insects and animals.
• The new biosphere needs to be maintained to
prevent it from falling out of balance.
• If plants grow too quickly and absorb too much
CO2 the planet cools down too much.
• If key species die out, we could see
populations collapse faster than they could
recover.
• On Earth, other species would move in to fill the
void, but our Martian biosphere is not as flexible.
 Challenge 3 : The Long-Term Future
• There is a problem we haven’t
addressed: Mars’ core does not produce
a magnetic field, so it does not have
enough protection from solar radiation
or cosmic rays.
• This becomes dangerous for the long
term health of Martian populations.
• So as a final step, we need an artificial
magnetic field.
• It just needs to deflect the solar wind
enough so that it doesn’t touch Mars.
• The easiest way is to construct a
magnetic umbrella far ahead of Mars
that splashes the solar wind to the
sides.
• It would orbit at the Mars-Sun L1 point,
keeping it constantly in between the
Sun and Mars and protect the new
• And that’s it!

• Terraforming Mars would take

some work, hefty resources
and probably a century or ten
but it would be the first time
we’ve lived in a home
designed and shaped solely
by us and for us.

• A first step towards our future

among the stars.
Current Mars Missions :
● Rovers : Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover ( for discovery
of life on mars ), Exo Mars Rover ( for understand if
Mars ever had life) , In sight lander ( to study the deep
interior of Mars ), Exo Mars Gas trace orbiter ( to find
gases which can support life ) , etc….
Bibliography
For successful completion of this project. I have taken
help from the following websites.

www.Wikipedia.com

www.NASA.gov

www.youtube.com

www.google.com
 Conclusion
This project helped us to understand in
depth details of Mars and how to make
a planet habitable and how space
agencies work and do their research
THANK YOU

Project by : Arnab Das, Aditya

Kumar, Dhruv Choudhari,
Divyanshu Sharma & Shreyas
Sinha