Has the Mars Rover Sniffed Methane?

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Has the Mars Rover Sniffed Methane?

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday November 1, 2012 @09:33PM from the smells-like-gene-spirit dept.

First time accepted submitter GrimAndBearIt writes "NASA's Curiosity rover is poised to settle years of debate on the question of atmospheric methane on Mars, which would be a sign of microbial life. With parts per trillion sensitivity, it's not so much a question of whether the rover will be able to smell trace amounts of methane, but rather a question of how much. NASA has announced that Grotzinger's team will discuss atmospheric measurements at a briefing on 2 November. If the rover has detected methane at sufficiently high concentration, or exhibiting temporal variations of the kind that suggests microbial activity, then it will surely motivate a desire to identify and map the sources."

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Wow how sad by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · 2012-11-01 22:04 · Score: 4, Insightful

8 posts so far, 8 fart jokes. I see space exploration is truly inspiring to Slashdot geeks...

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1. Re:Wow how sad by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-01 22:11 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Maybe the methane came from Uranus?
2. Re:Wow how sad by Jade_Wayfarer · 2012-11-01 22:31 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Not only that - said jokes are really plain and primitive. You can make a wide variety of jokes starting from "yo mama" (yo mama is so fat, that even the rover on Mars smelt her methane), all through "Uranus" jokes (to precisely detect methane you'll have to send the rover to Uranus), to some more abstract (let's hope that Mars is not a really shy planet, otherwise it'll become even more Red Planet if we manage to find methane there) and so on.
  
  Even if not funny by themselves, these jokes at least be somewhat creative, and some even may be called elegant (not my examples, of course). And yet we get something on a level of a dumb teenager. Hmm... maybe it's a deep social or political satire in there? Like "look, candidates, with that level of funding all that NASA can attract is a bunch of stupid fart jokes lovers"?
  
  --
  Absence of proof != proof of absence.
3. Re:Wow how sad by Lord+Lode · 2012-11-01 23:32 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Maybe it's because the article title uses the word "Sniffed" rather than, for example, "Detected".
4. Re:Wow how sad by telchine · 2012-11-01 23:44 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Let's wait until we have solid facts
  
  Mod parent up! Funny!
5. Re:Wow how sad by telchine · 2012-11-01 23:45 · Score: 2
  
  I am part of the problem too, I know
  You're just a gasbag!
Perhaps what we need is.... by meglon · 2012-11-01 22:14 · Score: 3, Insightful

to go with a set of small, dedicated probes that can only do a few things (say mass spec, air sampling, basic instruments) that have no mobility. They'd be loaded in bulk onto a platform to go from Earth to Mars, then into orbit. As it orbits, the platform drops the probes off at certain intervals, or in certain specific places. You could have a mix of probes doing different things, and use the one that would give the most information for that area; hell, you ould make it refillable, and send more as needed.

More limited than a rover, but much less expensive, and a lot less that could go wrong.... with a lot larger coverage area.

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Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
1. Re:Perhaps what we need is.... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-01 23:23 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  > More limited than a rover, but much less expensive, and a lot less that could go wrong.... with a lot larger coverage area.
  To be fair, not much has gone wrong with the rovers. OK, a bit fell off this one but it still seems to be functioning OK, and I hardly need to remind you of spirit and opportunity's track records.
  All the Mars mission failures so far have occurred in space. That's the bit we need to work on.
  I'd really like to see some kind of rover or instrument package dropped into the Valles Marineres. The ancient conditions that might have once harboured life on Mars (like the thick atmosphere, running water) should have persisted longer in those low altitudes than anywhere else. And if the Valles is in fact the result of some planet-ripping catastrophe that sterilised Mars, then I think we'd like to learn more about that, too.
2. Re:Perhaps what we need is.... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-02 00:22 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Seriously? Do you have any idea just how fricking big a planet is? Although smaller than Earth, Mars is HHHUUUUGGGEEEE on human scales. And it is all empty. Barren. Desolate. Look out your window now, and imagine all the buildings, roads, people, animals, plants, rivers, oceans... everything except for the dirt and the rocks.. gone. All the way to the horizon. Just barren, rocky nothingness. Now imagine that from the horizon to the next horizon. And again, and again, and again. Imagine walking or driving for weeks or months through that landscape, seeing nothing but rocks, rocks, dirt and rocks. And you thought it was a long way down the road to the chemist.
  Do you really think a few tiny bits of technology scattered here and there - hundreds or thousands of miles apart - are really going to spoil the view? And for who exactly? If there is life on Mars it's not exactly going to be worried about property prices. You could strip-mine an area the size of Brazil into a toxic sludgepile and still have infinitely more square kilometres of perfectly-preserved rocky boringness left over than you'd know what to do with.
  The hard truth is, most of space is dead, dead, dead. There might be a lot of question marks in the Drake equation, but even with the most optimistic numbers, most of the of the worlds in this galaxy are just drab, sterile rocks floating in a vacuum, with nothing better to offer existence than to be explored and exploited by us. Undoubtedly there are pristine habitats and natural wonders out there worthy of preservation. Olympus Mons almost certainly counts among them. The Valles Marineres too, and doubtless other sites yet to be discovered. Yet another Martian plain, however, does not warrant UNESCO galactic heritage status, and even if it did I would still dispute your assertion that a little remote-controlled buggy driving over it is somehow ruining it forever.
  And besides, even if we did find life on another world- not even intelligent or even multicellular life- then you can bet your luddite ass that NASA and their counterparts in other space programs would be insanely respectful of it. If Curiosity digs up a microbe on Mars, they'd be extra-triple sure their next mission was even less likely to bring Earth organisms to the planet than the last. Hell, they would probably seriously question whether to send anything else to the surface at all. And not just because they wouldn't want to contaminate the science - they'd do it because that microbe is important in its own right, and it would be wrong for us to jeopardise its survival, and because Mars rightfully belongs to the microbes.
  Trying to portray our planet's space scientists as inconsiderate jerks firing shit up into space willy-nilly like a bunch of rednecks with a stack of beercans and a skeetshooter does no justice at all to a group of thoughtful, intelligent and passionate people who value the beauty and majesty of the heavens a thousand times more than you or I ever will.
3. Re:Perhaps what we need is.... by terjeber · 2012-11-02 00:26 · Score: 2
  
  All the Mars mission failures so far have occurred in space
  I'd say they have occurred on earth, prior to lift off, but...
4. Re:Perhaps what we need is.... by DerekLyons · 2012-11-02 01:22 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  More limited than a rover, but much less expensive, and a lot less that could go wrong....
  Yes, (much, much) more limited than a rover, but no, not much less expensive in the end. You're talking a big and fairly capable mother platform to carry and communicate with more than one or two probes, and those don't come cheap. (Neither do the EDL systems for the probes.) And no, there isn't much less that could go wrong - each probe could go wrong, and you have a single point of failure in the mother platform.
  So, for not much less money and roughly the same level of mission risk - rather than getting comprehensive science on a single location, you get pretty much useless individual and unrelated data points from a variety of locations.
Who here worked on Viking? by Maow · 2012-11-01 22:20 · Score: 4, Interesting

I remember reading something on Slashdot *years* ago by someone (MBone?) that worked on Viking and still had some documents / protocol info in his garage.
Anyone who did work on Viking landers, I'd love to read what you think about this impending announcement.
Feel free to add any tales / memories that might be relevant; I'm sure there are some fascinating stories that could be told from a real space nerd.
Dammit, I wish I could find the original post referred to in my first line...
Cheers
1. Re:Who here worked on Viking? by cultiv8 · 2012-11-02 00:35 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Here's the original post: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=278121&cid=20338487
  
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You do not understand systems engineering by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-01 22:22 · Score: 3, Interesting

I think the easiest part of the experiment is the rover. Getting delicate scientific instruments to survive the trip is challenging, and getting them integrated a space system is brutal.
Has the Mars Rover Sniffed Methane? No by Nerzhul · 2012-11-01 22:54 · Score: 4, Interesting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
1. Re:Has the Mars Rover Sniffed Methane? No by The+Pea! · 2012-11-01 23:16 · Score: 2
  
  There's already previous evidence of methane from spectrography.
Re:microbial or anorganic? by arisvega · 2012-11-01 23:21 · Score: 5, Informative

In absence of free oxygen in Mars atmosphere, it is probably quite stable.
No, quite the opposite actually- it gets destroyed (photodissociated) by -mainly- UV radiation.
Methane being unstable and easily destroyed in the Martian atmosphere is the whole point of using it as a 'life-tracer': if it is around at high and unaccounted for amounts, then there has to be continuously produced somehow, and so far a biological origin for its production cannot be ruled out.

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Re:Even if there is temporal variation... by Savage-Rabbit · 2012-11-01 23:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

Even if there is temporal variation, why are they so certain that the methane in the air is due biological activities?
They are not, in fact scientists have been really busy trying to come up with alternate explanations for the presence of methane on Mars. However, the indications that the methane may be due to life are strong enough to make this worth investigating even though the odds are probably rather slim.

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Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Let us assume there is methane. by vikingpower · 2012-11-02 00:01 · Score: 3, Interesting

And let us assume that microbial life is the explanation we are or, better, NASA is going for. What then ? Will this radically change the focus of Mars exploration ? Are we then going to search frantically for said microbes ? And if so: how ? And when ? And where ?

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1. Re:Let us assume there is methane. by biodata · 2012-11-02 00:10 · Score: 2
  
  There was discussion here before that Venter is planning the next bit - to try to amplify any DNA that is there and sequence it http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/10/20/1446244/craig-venter-wants-to-rebuild-martian-life-in-earth-lab That takes care of the what and how. Not sure about the other two.
  
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  Korma: Good
Re:Lack of scientific knowledge by terjeber · 2012-11-02 00:24 · Score: 2

a dislike of fart smells would probably reduce your chance of reproducing
I don't think a dislike of certain kinds of smells is going to be this AC's main impediment to reproduction once he reaches sexual maturity. His never getting up the courage to leave his mommy's house will be higher on the list.
Re:First by Hognoxious · 2012-11-02 00:36 · Score: 2

He who denied it supplied it.

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Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Re:First by benjfowler · 2012-11-02 00:39 · Score: 2

Whoever made the rhyme, did the crime.
The isotope ratios will be the most interesting by Squidlips · 2012-11-02 01:15 · Score: 4, Interesting

The significant part of the observation will be the C13/C12 isotope ratio. Curiosity's SAM/TLS device can sort out carbon (and oxygen) isotopes. Enhanced C12 would suggest a biological source.
1. Re:The isotope ratios will be the most interesting by Squidlips · 2012-11-02 02:40 · Score: 2
  
  But....first MSL has to detect methane and then it has to get enough to run the TLS isotope detection. Also enhanced C12 suggests life but this is based on Earth life. Maybe Mars life is different, if it even exists. Also a baseline for the a-biotic Mars C13/C12 ratios for Mars needs to be established which not easy either....
Re:First by camperdave · 2012-11-02 01:21 · Score: 4, Interesting

Joking aside, it is entirely possible that what the rover is detecting could be coming from the rover itself. There are all sorts of plastics on the rover: wiring insulation and cable ties, paint, adhesives, etc. that may be breaking down and giving off methane. There may be residues from the pyrotechnics that may be leaching traces of the gas. So yeah. It may be a case of "He who smelt it, dealt it".

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Re:Tradition by dkleinsc · 2012-11-02 01:33 · Score: 4, Interesting

Actually, it's even older than that: There's apparently a Sumerian tablet from 1900 BCE with a fart joke. Aristophanes also was well known for writing fart jokes.

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Re:First by Abstrackt · 2012-11-02 01:49 · Score: 3, Insightful

Just out of curiosity (no pun intended), wouldn't it be fairly easy to identify false positives? For example, if the concentration of methane appears to increase the longer the rover is stationary the more likely it is that it's coming from the rover rather than the atmosphere, assuming no wind anyway. And if there was wind any methane produced by the rover would be carried away and become a non-issue as well, right?

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They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Actually, it hasn't by proslack · 2012-11-02 02:17 · Score: 2

If you read the article, you will find that "NASA's Curiosity rover is poised to settle the question as early as this week." No findings have been released as no data has been acquired (at least nothing acknowledged in the article). In any case, the presence of methane is of less interest than the concentration; it is found in interstellar space http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1991ApJ...376..556L

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Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
Methane Life by zerosomething · 2012-11-02 02:45 · Score: 2

If methane means life then Titan must be a cesspool http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060802methanelakes.htm

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