Possible life on Mars - Methane burping microbes
- Thread starter DarthTom
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Curiosity Rover Finds Methane on Mars: What It Could Mean for Life.
NASA's Curiosity rover has recently made a surprising find on Mars that could help scientists get one step closer to figuring out if the Red Planet has ever supported life.
The 1-ton Curiosity rover also discovered a fleeting spike in the levels of methane at its landing site, Gale Crater. Over the course of four measurements in two months on Mars, average methane levels increased 10 fold before quickly dissipating, but the cause of the fluctuation is still unknown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
If it is discovered that the Archaea microbe is present then a notion can be considered of Mars having life one it one time because the Archaea microbe could be part of the carbon nitrogen cycle on Earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea
NASA's Curiosity rover has recently made a surprising find on Mars that could help scientists get one step closer to figuring out if the Red Planet has ever supported life.
The 1-ton Curiosity rover also discovered a fleeting spike in the levels of methane at its landing site, Gale Crater. Over the course of four measurements in two months on Mars, average methane levels increased 10 fold before quickly dissipating, but the cause of the fluctuation is still unknown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
If it is discovered that the Archaea microbe is present then a notion can be considered of Mars having life one it one time because the Archaea microbe could be part of the carbon nitrogen cycle on Earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea
The methane thing has been "There's life on Mars, huh?" for like a decade or something, but it has done nothing but lie dormant. It was so long ago I almost think I was still in highschool when I concluded there are definitely cows up there, and even I fail to be excited that long.
Hopefully Curiosity can shed some extra light on it, but there are two orbiters – Mangalyaan in orbit since September and ExoMars that will run for president there in 2016 – that will get clearer answers than Curiosity would. Unless the methane is really coming from life on the surface, I'm not sure Curiosity will help pinpointing the source, particularly when we suspect it's something beneath the surface. But what do I know. Can it?
Sadly, methane is a relatively simple molecule* that has many potential sources, and the mere fact that we can't figure out where it is coming from isn't exactly a cause for celebration. Life is only a possible explanation because we assume that the formation of life isn't a crazy event. But the methane itself doesn't put any weight in proving that assumption.
We'll be in for a disappointment when they figure out the real source of the thing. At this point we should consider ourselves extremely lucky if the methane turns out to come from methane ice left by past bacterial life. But it is probably something much more undramatic... like cows.
* Seriously, it needs a second methyl group and a hydroxyl group to get me interested.
Hopefully Curiosity can shed some extra light on it, but there are two orbiters – Mangalyaan in orbit since September and ExoMars that will run for president there in 2016 – that will get clearer answers than Curiosity would. Unless the methane is really coming from life on the surface, I'm not sure Curiosity will help pinpointing the source, particularly when we suspect it's something beneath the surface. But what do I know. Can it?
Sadly, methane is a relatively simple molecule* that has many potential sources, and the mere fact that we can't figure out where it is coming from isn't exactly a cause for celebration. Life is only a possible explanation because we assume that the formation of life isn't a crazy event. But the methane itself doesn't put any weight in proving that assumption.
We'll be in for a disappointment when they figure out the real source of the thing. At this point we should consider ourselves extremely lucky if the methane turns out to come from methane ice left by past bacterial life. But it is probably something much more undramatic... like cows.
* Seriously, it needs a second methyl group and a hydroxyl group to get me interested.
The News reports on anything space-related just keep getting more bizarre. Oh! This rover saw a donut on Mars! That one saw a Human skull! The Associated Press or whomever must really like taking the piss at this sort of thing, because we see it alot. And yes, methane has been on Mars for a long time, now, and it's extremely likely to be caused by minerals in the Martian soil. NASA's known that almost from the onset and yet, I don't know ... finding stuff out on Mars isn't good enough, anymore. It's got to be punched up, exaggerated, even lied about just to be published so it can be ridiculed in the very same article. I don't get it ... why's it gotta be like that?
I read a headline on this news on Huffingtonpost. If I didn't read the article, I would have thought that NASA had discovered life. When I read the article, I learned that NASA thinks that life might existed in the past. In other words, no new developments in the search for past and current life on Mars.