Wind Power on Mars Can Power Human Habitats, Scientists Discover

A new study published in Nature Astronomy assessed the viability of turbines as an energy source for future Mars missions, and "the results hint that wind power could be an important pillar of energy generation on the red planet, assuming humans are able to successfully land there in the coming decades," reports Motherboard. From the report: Scientists have generally written off wind power as a key energy source for Mars missions, compared to solar and nuclear power, because Martian winds are extremely weak. Now, a team led by Victoria Hartwick, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, has used global climate models of Mars to show that, contrary to past assumptions, "wind power represents a stable, sustained energy resource across large portions of the Mars surface," according to the study. "Using a state-of-the-art Mars global climate model, we analyze the total planetary Martian wind potential and calculate its spatial and temporal variability," Hartwick and her colleagues said in the study. "We find that wind speeds at some proposed landing sites are sufficiently fast to provide a stand-alone or complementary energy source to solar or nuclear power." "Wind energy represents a valuable but previously dismissed energy resource for future human missions to Mars, which will be useful as a complementary energy source to solar power," the team added. To assess whether wind power could fill that gap, Hartwick and her colleagues used the NASA Ames Mars global climate model to estimate wind speeds across the planet. Since Mars' atmosphere is very thin, with only 1 percent the density of Earth's atmosphere, Martian winds are pretty wimpy everywhere. Even so, the researchers found that several tantalizing locations could theoretically use wind as the only source of power, and that a combination of solar and wind power would unlock sites across a huge swath of the planet -- including icy locations at the poles. To that point, the team identified several sites that would be particularly conducive to wind power, including locations within the icy northern regions of Deuteronilus Mensae and Protonilus Mensae. The researchers envision setting up medium-sized turbines, measuring 50 meters (160 feet) tall, to catch the stronger winds in these areas, allowing astronauts to subsist in the strange glacial terrain of an alien world. Turbines could also be effective if placed near topographical gradients, such as crater rims or the slopes of ancient volcanoes, to catch the gusts generated by these landscapes.

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