NASA’s retired chief scientist Jim Green says, we can terraform Mars to make habitable for humans with ‘giant magnetic’ shield

Jim Green has served as NASA's chief scientist for 40 years and just retired on Saturday

Jim Green, chief scientist and the director of NASA’s planetary science division, officially retired on Saturday, January 1, 2022. He informed us about his one last plan by saying terraforming Mars is 'doable' and he wants to transform Mars into a planet habitable for humans with the help of Geoengineering.

Green explained  his plan to The New York Times-we would put the Red Planet in a giant magnetic shield to block it from the sun's high-energy solar particles, this protective shield definitely would stop the sun from stripping Mars' atmosphere and reduce radiation level, allowing the planet to create a human-friendly climate.

Yeah, it’s doable. Stop the stripping, and the pressure is going to increase. Mars is going to start terraforming itself. That’s what we want: the planet to participate in this any way it can. When the pressure goes up, the temperature goes up.

The first level of terraforming is at 60 millibars, a factor of 10 from where we are now. That’s called the Armstrong limit, where your blood doesn’t boil if you walk out on the surface. If you didn’t need a spacesuit, you could have much more flexibility and mobility. The higher temperature and pressure enable you to begin the process of growing plants in the soils.- Green added

NASA's chief scientist Jim Green is most eager to find life on other planets, for this he has also created the Confidence of Life Detection (CoLD) scale. But not all scientists agree with this. Astronomer Lucien Volkowicz of the Adler Planetarium says that going to Mars and building a human settlement would be an ecological disaster. Because the way man is destroying the earth by digging, climate change, he will do the same with Mars. In such a situation, it is not right for humans to go to Mars.

Lucien Volkowicz says Jim Green is having a dream. It is not so easy to establish a human settlement on Mars. There is not enough reserve of carbon dioxide which can pump the atmosphere. to help warm it up. Whereas, Green says that scientists should be positive. If we get even a small fraction of life, then we should be ready for further research and research.

Before a December meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans, Green spoke about some of this wide-ranging work and the search for life in the solar system.

“The search for life on Mars has been a focus for NASA for so long, starting in 1976 with the Viking 1 and 2 landers and later with missions from the 1990s onward but what we're doing now is much more methodical, much more intelligent in the way we recognize what signatures life can produce over time. Our solar system is 4.5 billion years old, and at this time, Earth is covered in life. But if we go back a billion years, we would find that Venus was a blue planet. It had a significant ocean. It might actually have had life, and a lot of it. If we go back another billion years, Mars was a blue planet. We know now Mars lost its magnetic field, the water started evaporating and Mars basically went stagnant about 3.5 billion years ago.”

Green said: “A few years ago scientists had seen phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. The level at which the amount of phosphine was recorded was very high. Those scientists felt that if there is phosphine, then the possibility of life is also very high. But when it was measured on the CoLD scale, it was found that there is an absolute probability of life on the seven scale. He could not even reach a scale.”

“There are several aspects on how to do the magnetic shield. I’m trying to get a paper out I’ve been working on for about two years. It’s not going to be well received. The planetary community does not like the idea of Terraforming anything. But you know. I think we can change Venus, too, with a physical shield that reflects light. We create a shield, and the whole temperature starts going down”-he explained.

Though Green discussed his Mars plan with the NYT in honor of his retirement, the former NASA official has been working on it since at least 2017 when he first revealed it to the public.

In a talk at the NASA Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop at NASA's headquarters in Washington DC, Green presented simulations, models, and early thinking about how a Martian magnetic field might be re-constituted and the how the climate on Mars could then become more friendly for human exploration and perhaps communities.

In his science career, Green has specialized in the study of magnetic and electric fields and low energy plasma in the solar system.

'I feel tremendously proud about the activities I've done at NASA,' said Green.

'In many ways, NASA is not a job but It's a way of life. We're always looking for ways to do the impossible. The fact that we continue to succeed and do those things is a tremendous excitement for everyone, and really is important not just for NASA, but for the nation.' 

Since joining NASA in 1980, Jim Green has seen it all. He has helped the space agency understand Earth’s magnetic field, explore the outer solar system and search for life on Mars. As the new year arrived on Saturday, he bade farewell to the agency.

Over the past four decades, which includes 12 years as the director of NASA’s planetary science division and the last three years as its chief scientist, he has shaped much of NASA’s scientific inquiry, overseeing missions across the solar system and contributing to more than 100 scientific papers across a range of topics. While specializing in Earth’s magnetic field and plasma waves early in his career, he went on to diversify his research portfolio.