tecoyah

Could it be? True evidence of Martian microbial life? Combined with the never figured out Viking data, and other evidence, You never know.

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skullfunk

While I think the evidence is piling up and microbial life will be found in our lifetime, neither methane nor water necessarily means life.

The methane could come from volcanic vents and water isn't created by life, it merely holds primordial life.

Here's a link

Asuka{eve}

I think I heard somewhere that we brought some bacteria or microbes to mars from the rovers. Im not sure if it's true though.

rev_skarekroe

huh huh, methane.

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Astrocloud

Evidence that parts of ancient Mars had oceans and might have supported some form of life in the past grabbed front-page headlines just a few weeks ago.

But detection of the simple carbon compound methane in the Martian atmosphere by both ground-based telescopes and an orbiting spacecraft spotlights an even more intriguing possibility: There might be primitive life, even today, on the Red Planet.

By analyzing data collected by an earthbound telescope in 1999, Vladimir A. Krasnopolsky of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and his colleagues have measured Martian methane at 11 parts per billion. They've posted an abstract on the Internet and plan to announce their findings at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Nice, France, later this month, Krasnopolsky says.

Other planetary scientists announced last month that a spectrometer aboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft (SN: 2/21/04, p. 125: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040221/note11.asp) found methane at a concentration of about 10.5 ppb in the planet's atmosphere. Vittorio Formisano of the Institute of Physics and Interplanetary Space in Rome presented the findings at a press conference last month in Paris.

The agreement of the ground-based–telescope results with the Mars Express data is "very reassuring," says Krasnopolsky's collaborator Toby Owen of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.

Both sets of findings corroborate data that Michael J. Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., presented last September at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Monterey, Calif. In 2003, using sensitive spectrometers at two large ground-based telescopes, Mumma's team detected methane in the Martian atmosphere at concentrations ranging from 10 parts to 30 ppb.

Methane is an intriguing compound to find in the Martian atmosphere because it can't survive there long. It takes sunlight only about 400 years to break down methane in the Red Planet's atmosphere. The similar concentrations of methane detected over a 5-year period therefore suggest that the lost material is continuously replenished.

Krasnopolsky's team calculates that comets striking Mars couldn't deliver enough methane to replace what's lost. It's possible that the methane could be seeping out from underground reservoirs of material left over from the planet's formation. Or, as on Earth, the organic compound could be a by-product of bacteria on or beneath the surface of the planet.

One of the locations where Mumma's team found elevated methane lies above Meridiani Planum, the equatorial region where the NASA rover Opportunity found signs of a past ocean. That site might still contain underground deposits of water and, if so, "could potentially support active life forms," Mumma notes.

Such musings are "all very hypothetical," he emphasizes. But one test may discern whether the Martian methane has a biological origin. On Earth, methane made by living things has a ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 that's slightly elevated compared with methane produced by nonbiological sources. If organisms on Mars were similar to those on Earth, they, too, would produce methane with an elevated ratio.

Members of Krasnopolsky's team have proposed that a spectrometer sensitive enough to detect the slight difference in carbon ratio could be part of a Mars lander laboratory planned for launch in 2009. A space-based infrared spectrometer, proposed by Mumma's team for launch at the end of the decade, would also have the capability to determine carbon-12–carbon-13 ratios.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040410/fob3.asp

tekaweni

hope nobody who worked on the mars landers had flu, god knows we wouldnt want to eff up someone else's planet like our own

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rollo

Personally, I believe the methane is mainly geological...but if its coming from vents and volcanic openings, there's a possibility that archaic microbial life may exist there.

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jujueye

Exactly. And also, it will be primordial "life as we know it." It interests me that we search based on what we know is life. There is a huge possibility that we could stumble upon some kind of life and not even know it. As we have yet to find anything living yet, I think the science population should keep an open mind and not search for the items we know can start life: blue-green algae, water, etc.

Just my 2 cents from the Carl Sagan portion of my brain.

sam95519

I think that some of the pictures from the Mars Landers show that there is water of Mars currently, we just need to have the correct testing equipment on site.... Brines can remain liquid down to -40C.....Some of the pictures seem to show what looks like clay like material.....???

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Astrocloud

The methane on mars is from ancient martian lifeforms farting.

Esen

WOW thats a conspiracy theory I never ever thought of but would make sense.

We start life on Mars!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Think about it why not,

See what happens It would be just the perfect experiment for our governments to try,
Why not?
If it all fucks its like a long ways away from us lol

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bond007

soooo... any theories as to how the oceans went away? did they just simply dry up? did some type of large celestial body... such as a pre-planetary Venus... basically suck them off the planet (along with most of Mars' atmosphere)?

any thoughts? anyone? anyone? Bueller?

tecoyah

One theory is that the water is still there , as permafrost. There is water in the ice caps as well. Most scientists dont think the planet was covered in oceans , as the Earth is. But rather, had shallow seas and large lakes at one time, between 1 and four billion years ago.

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bond007

no, this would be fairly recently... as in Mars having oceans & an atmosphere in the neighborhood of 4,000 years ago!

tecoyah

In that case, no. Nothing even approaching a scientific theory would claim this was likely.

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SaltPork

Sorry about the methane on Mars. My bad, shouldn't have had those burritos.

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hotzot

I didn't know microbes farted?

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