Scientists Plan to Make Mars Surface Cultivable

Astronauts who travel to Mars in the future will be able to harvest vegetables and fruits on the red planet.

So when they sit down to dinner they should at least have plenty of greens.

The freak ecology  on Mars has always made growing food a daunting prospect.

However, scientists bet on solving the problem with sheets of material that can transform the cold, arid surface of Mars into land fit for farming.

The new material is named “aerogel” sheets work by mimicking Earth’s greenhouse effect.

They take energy from the sun and trapped it on the planet by carbon dioxide and other gases.

Scientists will spread out those sheets in the right places on Mars and they would warm the frigid ground and melt enough subsurface ice to keep plants alive.

Robin Wordsworth, who worked on the sheets at Harvard University, USA, said: “If we want to make sustainable habitats on another planet using present-day technology, this approach could be very useful. It’s completely scalable, so the area covered could be anywhere from a few square meters to large regions of the planet.”