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Methane on Mars could signal life
Topic Started: Mar 29 2004, 04:16 PM (79 Views)
PRINCEofNIGHTMARES
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Methane on Mars could signal life


16:24 29 March 04

NewScientist.com news service

Methane has been detected on Mars by three independent groups of scientists. And this could be a sign of life - indicating methane-producing bacteria.

But scientists are advocating caution when interpreting the results, saying that the instruments looking for chemical signatures in the Martian atmosphere are not yet good enough to conclusively detect methane. Even if methane exists on Mars, the gas could be a product of non-biological processes such as active volcanoes.

In mid-March, the European Space Agency announced that a team led by Vittorio Formisano of the Institute of Physics and Interplanetary Science in Rome had detected methane in the Martian atmosphere.

Formisano's team used the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) aboard the Mars Express spacecraft currently orbiting the planet. The instrument maps the infrared radiation from the Martian environment in wavelengths from 1.2 to 50 micrometres. Any elements in the atmosphere will absorb radiation at characteristic wavelengths, leaving tell-tale dark lines in the spectra.

The researchers averaged data from nearly 1700 spectral samples taken by Mars Express in January and February 2004 and found a line at exactly the point where one would be if methane were present in the Martian atmosphere. "We have been able to detect a very small quantity of methane," says Formisano. "It's around 10.5 parts per billion."

"This report is very exciting," says Michael Mumma, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US. The result is a confirmation of Mumma's own finding of methane on Mars, reported at the annual meeting of Division for Planetary Sciences in September in 2003.


High resolution


His team detected one spectral line for methane on Mars using highly sensitive infrared spectrometers attached to the Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachon, Chile, and the Keck-II telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

"These are very high resolution spectra compared with the spectra that the PFS is returning from Mars Express," says Mumma. According to him, the resolution of the ground-based telescopes used by his team was 50 times greater than instruments on Mars Express.

Both these results are being supported by yet another group. Vladimir Krasnopolsky of the Catholic University of America in Washington DC and his colleagues have also found a single spectral line for methane on Mars using the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope. They will be presenting their results at the European Geophysical Union's meeting in Nice, France in April.


Geothermal reservoirs


The three reports are fuelling speculation about where the methane comes from, although more confirmation is needed.

Methane in the Martian atmosphere is not stable and cannot last more than a few hundred years, because it reacts with hydroxyl ions in the presence of sunlight, forming water and carbon dioxide. "The fact that methane is present on Mars means that there must be a source," says Formisano.

On Earth much of the atmospheric methane is produced by methanogenic bacteria that digest organic matter in areas such as wetlands and waste landfills, and even in the guts of some animals and produce methane as a by-product.

There is also methane beneath the Earth's crust that is left over from the formation of hydrocarbons. This old methane is routinely belched out by mud volcanoes, vents, and bubbling pools, or it slowly seeps out of fissures in Earth's crust. Methane can also be formed during volcanic eruptions and in geothermal reservoirs.

Formisano's team is now trying to determine variations in concentrations of methane in the Martian atmosphere to nail down any obvious sources.
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NoZ
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L\i/Q LEADER

They wanna say looky at what we found but their boss is trying to step on them saying no we need more.
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Not_Tellin
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Bosses.. never satisfied LOL ;) :nt:
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SSG1
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:fart:
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