Nasa boffins could send a magnetic shield to grow alien lifeforms on Mars
Space agency's Planetary Science Division director says surrounding Mars with a magnetic shield could warm it up and make it habitable
A MASSIVE magnetic shield could help warm Mars up enough to encourage alien life to grow, Nasa boffins have claimed.
And we already have the technology to create the huge magnetosphere, which could create an atmosphere above the red planet.
The ambitious plans were revealed by Nasa's Planetary Science Division Director, Jim Green during a planetary science conference in Washington this week.
Scientists believe that Mars' was once temperate and had surface water around 3.5 billion years ago but its atmosphere was stripped away by solar winds blasting from the sun.
There is evidence of its polar caps which could unleash a pool of liquid one seventh of the size of its ancient oceans.
But if we were to let nature do its job, that could take up to 700 million years to heat up enough, experts estimate.
We could speed this up by building an "artificial magnetosphere" to rebuff pesky solar particles and help foster an atmosphere that could help life blossom, Green told an audience at the .
The magnetic field would stop solar winds from stripping it of oxygen and could create a shield from high energy particles.
Green said: "This is not terraforming where we artificially change climate, but we let nature do it, based on physics we know today. "
We already have the technology to send the shield to orbit between the Earth and Mars, he added.
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Green admitted that "we have a little work to do" but "currently, we can launch a system in L1 that can generate high field strengths to provide a magnetic shield".
Mars will sit in the magnetotail of the dipole, called Mars L1, allowing it to create its own atmosphere.
And within a matter of years, we could see signs of a climate.
If achieved, it might be a case of going back to the future.
A radical new theory has claimed that humans are the descendants of Martian life which came to Earth billions of years ago.
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