For life elsewhere in the solar system, Mars is probably the least bad choice. Today, the planet is a frigid desert, but the dry river valleys that cut through its surface suggest that in the past conditions were quite suitable for liquid water.

For decades, scientists and science fiction writers have toyed with the idea of ​​“terraforming” Mars to a warmer state—changing the planet’s climate to make it Earth-friendly. Their proposals involve heroic engineering: injecting large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, for example, or using nuclear explosives to melt subsurface ice.

An article published this week Science Developments, offers a simpler method. Samaneh Ansari, a graduate student at Northwestern University in Illinois, and her colleagues believe that injecting dust into the atmosphere could warm Mars to the point where most of the water ice beneath its surface would melt, at least during the Martian summer.

The dust will be made up of tiny metal rods, each nine-millionths of a metre long. This size has been carefully chosen to ensure that the particles reflect heat back to the planet’s surface, which would otherwise escape into space. Climate models suggest that injecting 30 litres of dust into the atmosphere could raise average temperatures by 30°C or more over decades.

That’s a fair amount of dust. But it’s a significant improvement over today’s equipment. Another paper, published in 2005, looked at CFCs, a potent class of greenhouse gases, and concluded that hundreds of millions of tons would be needed. Ms. Ansari believes her method is about 5,000 times more effective on a mass scale.

The paper is a proof of concept that has room to make things even more efficient, says Edwin Kite, a planetary scientist at the University of Chicago and one of its authors. Mars is certainly a tinkerer when it comes to planets. But the fix might be a little easier than you think.