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Methane on Mars?
mbone writes "Two independent groups are claiming the detection of methane in the Martian atmosphere, one using the
Mars Express orbiter,
and the other using ground based telescopes. This detection, if confirmed, would be of great significance for the search of life on Mars, as Methane will not last long in the Martian atmosphere and thus must be renewed, presumably either by biological processes or by volcanic vents, which would be a good place for life to develop. The leader of the ground based astronomy team, Michael Mumma of the Goddard Space Flight Center, when asked if the methane was biological in origin, said 'I think it is, myself personally.'"
...it will be indisputable evidence of living, farting Martian beings!
Actually, a couple of sources indicate that humans emit little or no methane when they pass gas.
This Crazy Wacko, Hoagland, is going to have a field day on this. He believes in all sorts of NASA coverups and apparently has a small following. He was mentioned recently on slashdot, as well, as the famous "Bad Astronomer" debunked some of his BS...
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Well, atleast he's not denying it. How did Michael get to Mars? Gee, he must have a heck of an intestinal disorder for it to be detectable with a telescope!
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"My theory of Martian Cows works!!!
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
"Bad Astronomer"
Is this another future Mac OS project, much like their famous Butt-Head Astronomer project.
Come to think of it, Bevis is a constellation.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I think it is myself, personally
...with an Earth-shattering Ka-boom!
He who smelt it, dealt it.
Hi. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such Martian flatulence films as "The Baked Bean Crater" and "Angry Red Anus".
Ahhh, methane. Proof of the existence of chili and beer on Mars. I'm on my way...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Who's to say we haven't taken any bacteria to mars the past few Yrs.?????
It is slowly coming closer. The day we actually find that source of life on another planet. It is beautiful and logical and perfectlly of sense to understand and grasp that we will some day find life, but the day we actually do discover it. That will be an amazing day simply for the achievement. Though anything we find on mars will be very simple (single celled things? bactiera? virii?) it will nonetheless be something.
It is life.
Mad, adj : Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence. Ambrose Bierce - The Deveil's Dictionsary
If this turns out to be what it seems to be it is a dream come true. I wonder how this might affect future missions. Hopefully they will start digging at last and not only look for indirect signs of life such as water.
There were some experiments onboard the Viking landers that showed some odd results but weren't invested any further.
The fact that the fine rovers are unable to detect life is a shame I think. They were designed to search for water only, I know. But they should at least have been equipped with minimal biological experiments too, just in case. I can't wait for a samplereturn mission...
Methane is already pretty common in the universe. Given the amount of craters on Mars, the simplest explanation is probably that a methane-laden asteroid or comet hit Mars at some point.
...
From Research Nebraska
Methane is the second-most abundant greenhouse gas. The world's agricultural livestock produce about 17 percent of the methane in the atmosphere. A byproduct of digestion, cattle and other ruminant animals produce methane when organisms in their stomachs called methanogens break down fiber in grasses and grains they eat.
Here are some pictures of the little critters, and here
Since we now know that once Mars had liquid water in significant amounts, and now we've found evidence of methane gas, there can only be one conclusion:
There were cows on Mars.
But what happened to the cows on Mars, you say?
Well, that's simple. As any reputably zoology dragon will tell you cows have infinite density. As Dr. Joel and Alex Veitch discovered in the Jaunuary 2004 issue of The Annals of Completely Fraudulent Research:
Obviously this means that all of Mars' water was not evaporated by a thinning atmosphere, but carried off by a massive cow-based singularity.
In order to prevent such a catastrophe from occuring on this planet it is clear that we must begin a systematic effort to minimize the cow population. Preferably using barbeque sauce...
I will love to see the ramifications to the worlds religions when life is actually found. The fall-out will be grand. With some luck it will put into proper perspective all the in-fighting that has been caused by 'holy wars' over the centuries.
Or they may just dismiss it as ' well, we don't consider that blob of bacteria life ' and move on believing man is the center of the universe, and continue to pummel their un-believing neighbors in a neighboring state.
Of course, depending on which book you use at the time...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
According to this article at The Guardian, NASA is actually thinking of creating earth-like conditions on Mars. Will I get to visit Mars in my lifetime? My expiration date is sometime in the years around 2070.
BTW, has anyone seen Red Planet?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
traces of Beano. That would be a sure sign of intelligent, carbon based life. . .
Methane is actually odorless. What you smell are mercaptans, which are either biologically generated along with methane, or, in the case of commercial gas, deliberately added to make leaks noticable.
...so little actual exploration happening now.
Seriously, I applaud the efforts of the rovers and the orbiters. They're doing a lot of good science, and we should be proud of what they've shown us. But at the same time, human explorers could do so much more, for not a heck of a lot more money (this $1 Trillion price tag that's been floating around is bad journalism at its finest). I say that all of this good news should serve as impetuous to get people on the surface of the Red Planet as soon as possible!
To all those people who worry about cross-contamination, come on...the two environments are so different, the chances that a microbe from one could survive in the other are basically nonexistent. Besides, it's been proven that unsterilized meteorites have been moving from one planet to another for several billion years now, so if cross-contamination was ever going to happen, it already would have.
How To Get Humans To Mars
The article says that methane in the atmosphere would decay over a few hundred years - so something is continuously renewing it...and that something is very likely to be life. Furthermore, we know (I think) that these hypothetical Martian beasts would have to be living underground in some very salty water.
o nd ay_040308.html ...which is talking about weird bacteria on Earth and how they manage to survive deep underground in salty water:
... produced in chemical interactions between water and rock" ???
OK - I can buy that - but I've been reading a bit about this subject - and I happened on this article:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_m
"On Earth, organisms do thrive deep underground -- hundreds of feet below -- without a single ray of sunshine. They live off chemical energy instead, like methane or hydrogen produced in chemical interactions between water and rock."
Wooaaahhh. Hold ON a minute. "methane
If methane can be produced between rock and water (eg: of the salty kind presumed to be found underground on Mars) then isn't the signature of 10 parts per billion of Methane in the atmosphere of Mars merely a further indication of underground water?
That's not what the 'experts' are saying though. Clearly I'm missing something - but I don't understand what.
Help?
www.sjbaker.org
RTF whole quote:
Asked whether the continual production of methane is strong evidence of a biological origin of the gas, Dr Mumma said: "I think it is, myself personally."
He added: "It's difficult to imagine that primordial methane [from geological activity] would continue outgassing for four billion years [the age of Mars]. This looks very intriguing."
Doesn't sound reckless to me. Sounds more like informed speculation.
FreeSpeech.org
Exponential growth is a best-case situation. In a harsh environment, bacteria replicate very slowly.
It isn't the same, but studies of bacteria living far underground offer a good example. They are starved, tiny. Often less than a thousandth the size of a normal bacteria. Their metabolism is so slow that according to Sci Am they may have an average frequency of cell division of once a *century* or even less.
Mars is even less hospitable. Far colder, far less water, and hardly more nutrients.
It seems to me that if you're going to believe we managed that with the probes it also seems just as likely one could argue for earth bacteria having made it there long ago on meteors.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
I remember Viking very well, as I worked on analysis of its tracking data. They had 3 biology experiments, plus a mass spectrometer (and various other instruments for other purposes, such as weather monitoring.)
Before the mission, they published the criteria for a postitive result from each biological experiment (along the lines of, add water to Martian soil and CO2 is given off; sterilize another soil sample and add water, and CO2 is not given off). The biology tests passes _every one_ of the pre-published tests, albeit with some variations.
However, the mass spectrometer saw no significant organic molecules (and there were no obvious large critters visible through the camera). This, more than anything, made them discount the biology results. If they had detected large organiic molecules in the soil, they would have claimed life, in my opinion. Instead, they came up with non-biological explanations.
However, this was all before we knew about the ability of life to exist deep underground and buried in rocks, etc., While the Viking results are not generaly regarded as requiring life, they are certainly not against a biological explanation of the Methane findings.
With that said, this certainly is exciting news.
If there turns out to be life on Mars, the best way to go about proving that this life was not carried from Earth by space probes would be very easy.
All one would have to do is study the DNA structure of the Martian life. There would be stark differences between Martian life DNA and Earth life DNA. The best analogy of this I can put forward would be one dealing with snowflakes. On the base level snowflakes are exactly the same thing. They form the same way, and are made of the exact same stuff (ice), but the key difference here is that while there are many similarities, no two snowflakes are exactly the same.
While the base similarities would be the same, there would be sufficient differences in Martian microbe DNA to say with absolute resolve that "These are not Earth bacteria!"