The real danger on Mars

The wind on Mars is the protagonist in various films with its whirlwinds and dust storms, some global, storms that envelop the entire red planet for months. For example, the 2015 film The Martian Land takes us to a Mars where humanity lives in large cities that are protected by transparent domes. A large colossal dust storm breaks the protective dome, destroying the city and eliminating most of its inhabitants in seconds.

Then that same colossal dust storm threatens to devastate the next city and with this the plot of the film develops, the question is, can the Martian destroy a dome of a future city or base on Mars? Okay, this movie was produced by the same people as the shark rain movie, but it seems like a possible catastrophe if we take into account the magnitude of the global dust storms, however, the answer is no.

The biggest problem for structures protected under a dome is not in the Martian wind, it is in the micrometeorites, the Martian atmosphere is very weak, it is barely 1% of the density of the Earth's atmosphere, this would be the average. in the low equatorial regions, which is where human bases and possible human cities are supposed to be installed, although there are places like the Hellas basin that is about 7 km below the average height of Mars and there the pressure would be somewhat higher, but even so they are very low levels, similar to the Earth's pressure that we would find at between 40 to 60 km high.

Mars manages with its atmosphere to destroy very small meteors, about the size of a grain of sand or the size of a coin, but little more, the small asteroids a few centimeters in diameter that on Earth would easily end up disintegrating at a high altitude, on Mars they can impact the surface at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour, up to 72,000 km/h, the fastest ones, and in the case of the dome, they would pierce it with a catastrophic result, since the dome is actually like a cylinder of pressurized gas, maintains 100 times more pressure inside than outside.

The impact of a meteorite would not be a simple hole in that glass dome, it would be a catastrophic structural failure, the internal air would escape with such violence that the structure could explode outward like a grenade, you may ask, what if we made the dome armored? Well, we would have a problem, because right now there is no material that meets three essential conditions: first, that it guarantees resistance to the impact of a meteorite at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour and also that it maintains the pressure of the internal gas.

Second question, that it be transparent so that sunlight reaches the crops and third question, that it be ultra light to be able to build such a huge structure. And the wind, could the wind do any damage to that protective dome of that possible city? The most the Martian wind can do is erode the transparent panels of that dome with grains of sand and dust and it would be a process that would last many years and would also be easy to detect, since the affected areas would have lost their transparency, something quite annoying, by the way, since if the affected sections are not renewed it would be like living under a perpetual fog.

And then there is the matter of cosmic radiation, which a transparent dome could not stop, for all, although it is much less attractive, the cities on the Moon and Mars will not be replicas of our cities protected under elegant crystalline domes, but they will be structures built under land inside the large tunnels resulting from the activity of volcanoes millions of years ago.

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