Back in July 2019 an intriguing paper appeared in the journal Nature Astronomy. The article reports on a study undertaken by Wordsworth, Kerber, and Cockell to investigate what might happen if you plastered parts of Mars with a thin, two to three centimeter layer of silica aerogel.
The background motivation for this work (which included both experiments here on Earth and mathematical modeling) was to ask whether there are alternative ways to imagine terraforming Mars - making it more suitable for life such as exists on Earth.
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