Could a comet impact next year produce a more habitable Mars?

If you missed the news about it, there's a chance that a comet — named 2013 A1 (Siding Springs) — may hit Mars in October 2014. Astronomers have been keeping telescopes trained on this comet to get a better idea of the odds of impact, and NASA recently put together a video to update us.

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Personally, I have mixed feelings about an impact.

I would definitely feel bad about the Mars rovers — Curiosity and Opportunity. At this time, there's little to no chance of knowing exactly where on Mars the comet would hit, so we don't know if either of the rovers would be destroyed by the impact. They're on opposite sides of the planet from each other, so we'd be guaranteed that at least one of them would survive. However, if Opportunity was the survivor, we'd likely lose it anyway, in the global dust storm that got kicked up in the aftermath.

Of course, they're just robots, but we've been following them on their interplanetary adventures for awhile now, so there's a certain emotional investment.

At the same time, though, I have to admit a certain scientific curiosity about what the Martian environment would be like after an impact. As Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program said: "An impact would loft a lot of stuff into the Martian atmosphere — dust, sand, water and other debris. The result could be a warmer, wetter Mars than we're accustomed to today."

It wouldn't result in a Mars that was habitable to us, but it might result in a more habitable Mars — perhaps enough that it would make colonizing the planet easier in the future.

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All this concern and speculation is premature, of course, since the odds are still pretty slim that the comet will actually hit Mars (about 1 in 2,000). However, even though astronomers are getting a good estimate of the comet's trajectory now, that trajectory is going to change (possibly at random) as the comet heats up and starts producing jets of gas as it gets closer to the Sun. Those gas jets may push the comet further away, or it might push it onto a direct collision course with the planet.

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