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Forget about how we get it there, some kind of top secret experiment on mars gone wrong in all the right ways.
If somehow Mars's core was mixed with some amount of antimatter, and assuming 100% of it reacts, could the core of the red planet be restarted?
Calculate how much energy is needed to melt the core.
Obtain that much energy somehow.
Use that energy to produce antimatter/matter particle pairs. (Additional energy needed for inefficiencies and losses in the process, plus storage mechanism). Using E=MC2 you can note the quantity of antimatter that corresponds to.
Discard the produced matter, keeping only the antimatter.
Figure out how to deliver antimatter to the core.
It seems like it would be easier just to deliver the energy more directly. Like, maybe microwaves? You don’t waste half and you can beam it and not overcomplicate things with handling and delivery. How are you going to dig holes and distribute antimatter within the core?
It sounds like you feel like antimatter is just laying around to be used like petrolium. The real issue is the energy.
This would need a very delicate balancing act. Too much antimatter and the planet is destroyed, while too little and the core either does not melt fully, or not at all.
What we would hope for is the reaction releases enough energy to start the core melting, but not so rapidly that plate tectonics would be destabilized (assuming there are crustal plates on Mars). The energy release is also buried under thousands of kilometres of rock, so it will take a long time for the heat energy to reach the surface. This is probably for the best, so plumes of magma rising from the core don't reactivate the Tharsis volcanos or overwhelm the rest of your terraforming project. Suddenly discovering you are building over the equivalent of the Yellowstone super volcano is not gong to be a pleasant experience.
So the amount of antimatter will actually be rather small relative to the core, but still an industrially significant amount. Dropping it while you are setting up the worksite on the surface will probably not do the project much good...
Interesting question and one I think Olympic Mons would be in total agreement with ... might even create an atmosphere. Without electromagnetism this is a dead Planet...plus its small...so I say "go for it." Interesting to postulate that Jupiter has an anti-matter core btw...
