Methane on Mars

[I, Brian]

The wider press reported this issue as if lief were really discovered indirectly.

Luckily, the announcement came from the European Space Agency team first, so the message remains pretty sombre and reserved - unlike some of the silly NASA briefings on life issues in the past.

But is it really due to life? Just because there is no obvious current vulcanism on MArs does not means to say that nothing is happening underground. After Mars, has a violent geological past. Let's not forget that Mars is indeed home to the largest volcano in the Solar System: Olympus Mons.

Anyway, here's the story as it appeared in New Scientist:


Methane on Mars could signal life

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.


More: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994827



And here's a Viking picture of the 10 mile high volcano: