Ammonia Could Indicate Life On Mars

Young Master writes "Just seen this story on good old Auntie Beeb, apparently traces of ammonia have been found in the Martian atmosphere. Ammonia doesn't last long on Mars, so it must be constantly replenished - it could be active volcanoes (none yet found), or it could indicate life..." Along with the detection of methane, Mars is starting to look a lot less dead than had been supposed.

Comments

Underground lava seems more likely.

[garcia]

So far the PFS has observed a depletion of carbon dioxide and an enrichment of water vapour over some of the large extinct volcanoes on Mars.
Ammonia is not a stable molecule in the Martian atmosphere. If it was not replenished in some way, it would only last a few hours before it vanished.

An underground lava theory seems much more plausible than microbes hoarding nitrogen. Underground lava beneath the extinct volcanoes could be releasing the ammonia into the atomosphere and thus explains how it is replenishing so quickly. Without other specific evidence of microbial life I really think we should just not get our hopes up, at least not yet.

Re:Underground lava seems more likely.

[cephyn]

I think this explanation, based on evidence, is equally as likely as the non-bio explanation, the lava tube one. However, Mars is thought to be relatively geologically dead, so an active lava tube this close to the surface (close enough to vent ammonia) would seem unlikely to have avoided detection by now. So a deeper, more sedentary lava bulge, warming the rock and allowing anaerobic microbes to survive of the heat seems to me to be an equally likely proposition. EITHER discovery would be fantastic.

Re:Underground lava seems more likely.

[cephyn]

Is earth vulcanism a good model for mars? I don't know. Different rock composition might make for radically different magma gasses. Are volcanos on Io similar to terran? I don't know...but I bet they're rather different. And of course, vulcanism on Triton is RADICALLY different than terran....so who knows what gasses a Martian volcano would release.

Re:Underground lava seems more likely.

[dnahelix]

"Whenever there is chemistry going on in a planet that we don't yet understand, there's this natural tendancy to yell "it must be life!". "

Tendancy? We've only seen chemistry on other planets (& moons) a handful of times, and I don't remember anyony yelling 'it must be life!' This is one of the grossest over-generalizations I've read all day.

I don't know where the ammonia is coming from on Mars. If there even is any; from the article: "Ammonia may have been found in Mars' atmosphere" But to just not buy an explanation, because you think it is just too implausible or because it turned out not to be false in another instance is just stupid.

Life was inevitable

[apikoros]

I am not at all suprised at this. I always regarded life on Mars as being inevitable for the following reasons:

1. There is no place on this planet that we have not found bacterial life,
2. we know that meteorites can travel between the two planets as we have found rocks of Martian origin in Antarctica.
3. if all rocks of earth origin contain bacteria and rocks from Mars can reach earth I would *expect* that life had travelled from earth to Mars via the same mechanism in reverse.

That the meteorites found in Antarctica contained fossil bacteria only makes the case stronger.

Re:Life was inevitable

[ShieldWolf]

A few deflating points:

1. There are places on earth where there is no bacterial life: try the upper atmosphere and farthest reaches of antarctica at the moment (both places as cold as Mars).

2. A human being has trouble surviving a re-entry inside a spaceship covered with heat-resistant tiles, do you really think a bacterium sitting on a rock that is heated up to a few thousand degrees has a chance in hell of surviving the trip?

3. Not all rocks of Earth origin contain bacteria, again those in the middle of antartica do not.

4. The rocks found in antartica DID NOT have fossilized bacteria. What they did have were crytalized structures that scientists figured could plausibly have been created by life. As for the famous picture: those structures are MUCH smaller than bacteria and scientists were careful not to say they were fossils.

The approach you should take is common-sense:

If I can kill all the bacteria in water by simply boiling it for a few minutes at ~100 celcius, do you honestly think it could survive on a rock that has is flung off the earth at escape velocity through the atmosphere, across the freezing vacuum of space and then plumetting through the martian atmosphere and then crashing to the ground?

Re:Life was inevitable

[cephyn]

1) There has been life found in the upper atmosphere and in the farthest reaches of antarctica.

2) some microbes live IN rocks, some very deep, so the outer layers of rock could protect an atmospheric entry. Especially since rock-loving microbes aren't bothered by extreme temperatures, the center of the rock could still be cool enough not to cook them.

3)Not all rocks, but way more than you'd expect.

4)No argument.

Yes, I believe it could since microbes were discovered on the moon landers after they'd been sitting on the moon for a few years. Also, earth rocks blown off that later re-enter and land have microbes that could survive. There's no event in your scenario that some microbes couldn't survive.

Re:Life was inevitable

[Teancum]

How absolutely sure are you that bacterial life is not in the upper atmosphere?

I've heard of bacterial capture as high as 50,000 feet. Do you mean higher than that? Like the 100 km altitude that Space Ship One went to?

And the same about Antarctica. How absolutely sure are you that you can't find some sort of bacterial remains or transport of some kind that can litterally be found in the middle of Antarctica? That is even ignoring the Antarctic research stations where I'm sure you can find bacteria in abundance. I've seen bacterial growth on alpine glaciers high on mountain tops, that live in conditions that are very similar to Antarctica. Antarctica is a big place, and to totally rule out anything living there is just too absolute.

Also, if you think boiling something for a few minutes in water at 100 C is going to kill bacteria, you really don't understand food science at all. What that normally does when you cook is kill bacteria and other organisms that are harmful to people. An autoclave does a much better job, but that is not normally something you would stick a chicken sandwich into.

One reason why it is suspected that bacteria could survive in space is because of Apollo-12, where the Surveyor probe, launched several years earlier, was "accidentally" contaminated before it was launched. Parts of this space probe were returned back to Earth in sealed bags, and it was detected that several bacterial cells survived not only the spaceflight to the moon, but "lived" on the moon for several years before coming back to the laboratories on the Earth. Nobody is claiming that they thrived and multiplied into huge numbers on the Moon, but they were able to survive and when put into a much more hospitable environment (like a petri dish full of agar in an Earth-based lab) they did thrive and begin to reproduce again.

Also, micrometeorites that are the size of a pin-head or even somewhat larger have been known to survive reentry without burning up from re-entry. It is not that difficult to bring things to the Earth that could survive, and certainly something the size of a bacterium could enter the Earth's atmosphere without heating up to several thousands of degrees C.

The only reason reentry is so difficult for spaceflight is because it is a cheap and easy way to reduce speed without having to fire rockets to reduce velocity for a safe landing. This has no relationship to small grains of sand that are orbiting the sun. Even a large rock will only get heated so much coming into the Earth's atmosphere, simply because the entry won't last that long. A very hard landing, but relatively quick transit time through the atmosphere. How many G's of force do you think a bacteria could take? I bet it is quite a bit more than a person could take, by about 1000x.

Not a flamebait, but...

[rfernand79]

I don't intend to go on a flamebait, but this kind of news seem to support Bush's "Go to Mars" space program. Yes, there are some of us who think it's great to explore Mars, but not at the expense of other resources. I keep hearing this comments on how government research funding has been redirected towards Mars... this is the flaw. I believe no resources should have been redirected, but instead, new resources created for a new project. Anyway, something to ponder...

Life vs. the Volcano

[doconnor]

Of the few planet like bodies we've observed we know of two with active volcanoes (Earth and Io) and one with life. However, we haven't really looked hard for life and there are several places where we are planning to look, including Mars and Europa.

While it would be far more exciting to find life then lava, I'm not sure the data backs the assumption that volcanoes are far more common then life.

We know there are only 2 planets/moons with volcanoes, making them a little rare. We know there is 1 planets/moons with life and serveral unknown. Our very palimerary evidence suggests volcanoes are twice as common as life.

We have evidence that life appeared on Earth as soon (by geological time scales) as it was possible to sustain it. There is debate on whether the life experiments on Viking come out positive or negative. Now we have methane and ammonia in the atmosphere.

Perhaps it is our arrogance that insists that we are so special, life of other planets is unlikely.

Judging from the smell...

[qtone42]

...of my technical advisor's litterbox, that life could consist or stealthy, rust-colorerd felines.

--QTone, not French