Wow. Fascinating stuff... Space related technology is progressing very rapidly. We're also not too far off from being able to mine astroids and meteors and stuff.
Just to clarify, this isn't terraforming. The reporter hasn't really understood what is being suggested. Terraforming is the act of altering a planet's climate and environment to the aim of supporting human life without the need of life support equipment. To terraform a planet along the lines of Mars or Venus would be a massive undertaking. Even if the present day entire economic, industrial and technological output of of human civilisation was focused on it, we still wouldn't see results for centuries. To suggest that these experiments are in the name of terraforming these planets would be akin to suggesting that making a cup of tea is an experiment in ascertaining how to boil the Earth's oceans. The gulf between principle and practice is so vast that it is essentially meaningless. What the reporter has done is grasp at the most speculative possible outcome for some research, and then claimed that it is the point of this research. Sadly, the vast majority of popular science reporting is sensationalised in such a way. This comic is startlingly accurate. What this research does do is look at a different idea known as In-Situ Resource Utilisation. This is the far more plausible idea of of simply using elements found on astronomical bodies as resources. Water is very heavy, and used for a huge number of things, so finding a way to make it in-situ would be a massive boon to space exploration. We don't need to terraform a planet in order to live there, but we do need water and oxygen. IRSU would be a necessary technology making the exploration, colonisation and exploitation of the rest of the solar system an awful lot more feasible. As one final note about "how to read science reporting" be wary about any article that says "NASA plans to do [thing] by [date]". NASA has teams of people who are employed to come up with interesting things to do in space. Unfortunately, putting hardware in space is phenomenally expensive and NASA budgets are dishearteningly easy to cut. Although NASA has done some incredibly impressive things, I would be surprised if their ratio of interesting ideas to interesting ideas actually carried out was better than one in fifty.
Also, terraforming the moon would be a non-sustainable prospect. Since its gravitational pull is so small, it would be unable to keep an atmosphere in place. In fact, Mars would have the same problem. Even Earth is losing the less dense gasses in its atmosphere to space, though at a very small rate. In order to sustainably terraform a planet, it would need to have earth-gravity or slightly greater for the terraforming to keep.
Another important aspect of ISRU is to produce fuel. A really expensive aspect of (manned) space missions is to carry your fuel for the return trip. The Moon landings utilized very small and light-weighted landing vehicles so they wouldn't have to bring the fuel for the return trip down to the lunar surface and back into lunar orbit. There is a trade off on the Moon though: You have do a powered landing. Which means that your lander has to be small and light-weighted or you spend all the fuel you save on the extra weight from the landing module by transporting it. Mars is a different challenge altogether because you can aerocapture. Instead of using your engines to land you just set your lander on a trajectory that brings it into the atmosphere and you can use parachutes to brake. You only have to fire your engines for a short time for course corrections and a soft landing. (Mars' atmosphere is a lot thinner than earth's (<1% surface pressure). An entirely parachute-dependent landing is less precise and the touch-down would be harder. Not something you want for a manned mission.) It would help a lot if a manned mission could produce water, oxygen and fuel on the surface instead of dragging it all the way out to Mars. ~~~~~~~ Concerning terraforming: Like MadScientist already said, terraforming Mars would be a huge undertaking and take a lot of time. Before we can even hope to begin would need to know a lot more about Mars, especially about the surface, the available materials, radiation and if there is already (still?) life on Mars. The cheapest way to terraform would be bacteria I think, then single cell organisms and plants. The old idea of building giant facilities to Mars to produce a breathable atmosphere (Aliens/Total Recall style) would be very inefficient, expensive and slow. So the most reasonable approach would probably be to start several small science colonies on Mars and to gather all the data. Next you want to do controlled experiments in a sealed environment. That alone would take probably decades. But you can't afford mistakes when using biomatter to terraform because once released it's very hard to control it. The next large problem is radiation. Mars has lost its magnetosphere and its surface exposed to all the nasty radiation that our ozone layer and magnetosphere are keeping at bay here on Earth. Living on the surface would expose you to amounts that even Russians would no longer consider treatable with vodka. (Vodka is a viable treatment for radiation poisoning because alcohol poisoning is very reliable and will kill you faster. ) Anyway, you need to find a way to shield your colony from radiation. There are several ways to do that as far as I know (water tanks, going underground, hydrocarbon layers in the walls). MadScientist, maybe you can shed some more light on this. Radiation will lead to mutation in the bio-factories that you want to use to terraform. This is what I consider one of the most dangerous parts of the process. You can't really predict what you end up with. A useful bacterium can turn into a colony-destroying monster if it starts eating through your structures, shielding, tanks, food supply, fuel reserves, isolation, seals, anything really. Considering in which environment it lives it will probably be resilient as hell and hard if not impossible to kill. Steering and controlling the terraforming process will be a huge challenge. Still, I consider it the most viable and realistic way to truly terraform a planet.
