Little Green Plants on Mars?

moorhens writes "The BBC is reporting the first evidence for chlorophyll on Mars. Without chlorophyll, plants' green pigment, and photosynthesis, life on Earth would be limited to deep ocean volcanic vents and politicians."

Comments

We need to go to Mars

[jspey]

Dammit, can we just send some people to Mars already? All this work with robots going around and looking at Mars and analyzing the soil and air and whatever is impressive but we'd learn a lot more if we could just send some people out there and have them do the collection and analyze everything and bring some of it back with them. People can travel a lot farther than the little robot rovers can and they can do it a lot more dependably and there's a lot more that can be done to analyze Martian soil and air here on earth rather than on site. Argh! Stupid polititians not giving stupid NASA enough money to build a stupid spaceship to go to stupid Mars. Well, hopefully this discovery will spur someone to go to Mars. Well, unless they end up not finding conclusive data.

Mr. Spey

Hey, what a groovy color, that looks just like...

[aldarion]

Close examination revealed that four of the cases occurred on the Pathfinder spacecraft itself. But two regions showed a chlorophyll signature in the soil around Pathfinder.

The fact that four out of six possible matches are on the spacecraft makes me really skeptical about the whole thing. Moreover, from reading the article, one might think they took just "any old picture" from the mission and ran it through some simple filter algorithms, to see if they found something interesting. Of course, such methods can be very valuable tools, especially at large scales, but this looks like a bit of overinterpretation to me. Plus chlorophylls?!? Come on, shouldn't we be able to detect those from orbital images or even Hubble, especially if they are so abundant in the soil?