by Tim Little <tim@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
Mar 11, 2008 at 08:25 AM
On 2008-03-11, Joy Beeson <jbeeson@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> How about hitting Mars with a constant stream of very small comets
> hitting just often enough to keep the atmosphere nice and balmy?
> There would be some interesting effects on the weather.
I'll say there would, though "interesting" is probably a weak word for
"devastating".
If Mars had an Earthlike atmosphere, it would be radiating about 20 PW
of net heat loss. A comet would probably hit with about 900 MJ/kg,
based on infall kinetic energy relative to Mars + Mars escape energy.
So you'd need an average of at least 22 Mg/s, or in other words two
billion tonnes impacting per day.
Actually it will take more because quite a bit of that impact energy
will be radiated straight back out again from local hot spots before
it heats up the bulk of the atmosphere.
- Tim
