Has the Mars Rover Sniffed Methane? 119
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
8 posts so far, 8 fart jokes. I see space exploration is truly inspiring to Slashdot geeks...
Re:Wow how sad (Score:5, Funny)
Let's wait until we have solid facts
Mod parent up! Funny!
Re:Wow how sad (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe the methane came from Uranus?
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No doubt they will get to the bottom of this
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I am part of the problem too, I know
You're just a gasbag!
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Even if not funny by themselves, these jokes at least be somew
Tradition (Score:2)
Considering that fart humor is a longstanding tradition (even the great Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca is on record with a fart joke or two), all I have to say is:
Whomever criticizes my verse made the atmosphere worse!
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Are you completely unanimous about that, Mrs Slocombe?
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Aparently my grammar is weak as water in the morning.
Re:Tradition (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, it's even older than that: There's apparently a Sumerian tablet from 1900 BCE [reuters.com] with a fart joke. Aristophanes also was well known for writing fart jokes.
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And yet we get something on a level of a dumb teenager.
Judging by the recent proliferation of folks who don't know when and when not to use an spostrophe, don't know who's from whose, or their from there, refusal to use capitalization, I'd say there are way too many ignorant teenagers here.
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I called TBS and operators have confirmed farts are indeed funny. I'm not sure why we are discussing it.
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Manned space exploration is inspiring. Sending out a bunch of probes .... not so much.
SpaceX has spent just $1 Billion in 10 years, and is looking by far the leading contender for landing the first man on Mars. The Mars Curiosity project costed $2.5 Billion. NASA's Orion spacecraft will probably be cancelled the moment a new President steps into office, replaced with a new project designed to redistribute pork-barrel money.
NASA's greatest recent achievement was providing approx $500 Million of funding to Sp
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Re:Wow how sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's because the article title uses the word "Sniffed" rather than, for example, "Detected".
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As opposed to your oh-so-informative post? At least they tried, you're just complaining.
No, they didn't, they made a lazy joke because they didn't have anything better to say. Seriously, if people didn't have anything to add except being the 100th person to make the same obvious joke, they'd contribute more by not saying anything.
It's very noticeable on Slashdot that when the discussion involves something scientific that's even moderately outside the core interests/competences of the average reader (i.e. tech and computer-related sciences), the number of jokes goes up.
You expect one or two jok
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8 posts so far, 8 fart jokes. I see space exploration is truly inspiring to Slashdot geeks...
I'd be willing to bet a good number of them have been made at NASA and JPL, too.
Fart jokes are like love -- they're a universal language that binds us all together.
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Well, we didn't start it. [youtube.com]
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Lighten up Francis! Not on Mars of course, we don't want our probes exploding.
Methane must be very effecite as a drug (Score:2)
Perhaps what we need is.... (Score:4, Insightful)
More limited than a rover, but much less expensive, and a lot less that could go wrong.... with a lot larger coverage area.
You do not understand systems engineering (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.
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Re:Perhaps what we need is.... (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.
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jesus man.. u could have written a book with all that.
I object to your portrayal of rednecks (Score:2)
They are a group of thoughtful, intelligent and passionate people who value the beauty and majesty of beercans a thousand times more than you or I ever will.
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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.
Interesting you mentioned this, as it is depicted as a constant point of conflict in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy [wikimedia.org] - where one group of settlers is violently opposed to the ongoing terraforming of Mars and argue that humans have no right to change its pristine state.
Speaking of the Drake equation, I think we have to content ourselves with exploring whatever prospect of life there is in our solar system only. If not Mars then Europa holds the next big hope of finding life in its ice locked sea. All the
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> 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 Marin
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All the Mars mission failures so far have occurred in space
I'd say they have occurred on earth, prior to lift off, but...
Re:Perhaps what we need is.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, 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
Re:Who here worked on Viking? (Score:5, Informative)
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Here's the original post: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=278121&cid=20338487 [slashdot.org]
Thank you!
That made for an interesting read, again. Threads like that are what make (made?) Slashdot such a great web site.
Now to self-flagellate for not finding that myself.
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This was on a fairly recent Discover-channel-ish documentary. They didn't detect organic compounds, so that voided their criteria. Might suck for us, but I'm on the Carl Sagan boat; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Make sure all your t's are crossed and i's dotted before you start mistaking some new chemical reaction or contamination for life.
Re:microbial or anorganic? (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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Has the Mars Rover Sniffed Methane? No (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines [wikipedia.org]
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There's already previous evidence of methane from spectrography.
Actually, it hasn't (Score:3)
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 [harvard.edu]
Is Betteridge's law of headlines correct? (Score:2)
Well, acccording to betteridge's law... look, guys, just because someone proclaims something as a "law" doesn't make it one. Especially if the someone is a journalist.
Wikipedia backs me up in your own link: "Betteridge has admitted to breaking his own law, in an article published at his own site."
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Could be microbial life. Could be that a comet crashed into Mars billions of years ago.
Unlikely, since stored Methane would, if it could be sniffed on the surface in high enough quantities, be destroyed by now unless the comet event was rather (cosmically) recent.
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So now we can burn it for energy on Mars . . . (Score:2)
. . . as soon as we find oxygen . . .
Even if there is temporal variation... (Score:1)
Even if there is temporal variation, why are they so certain that the methane in the air is due biological activities?
Re:Even if there is temporal variation... (Score:5, 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.
Urectum (Score:1)
Let us assume there is methane. (Score:4, Interesting)
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The isotope ratios will be the most interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
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K'breel missive? (Score:2)
Late-Breaking News: FLATULENCE! (Score:2)
The Council has been in deliberations. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, summarized the minutes of the deliberations thusly:
"Why, do the beings from the blue world seem so fixated on the offensive properties of methane, a gas released during respiration? Yet they completely ignore the offensive properties of water vapor, the substance most co
Methane Life (Score:3)
Insert here (Score:1)
Obligatory "he who smelt it dealt it" inserted for your listening pleasure.
The real question is ... (Score:2)
Did it come from Mars cows and when can we turn them into burgers?
Results are in (Score:1)
Why are you asking me? (Score:2)
Has the Mars Rover Sniffed Methane?
How the hell would I know?
Methane means life, but... (Score:2)
...doesn't that presuppose that carbon-based life is all that matters? We assume so since we're carbon based. But life needn't be, really.
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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.
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He who denied it supplied it.
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Re:First (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:First (Score:4, 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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Yeah. ...because it's almost a sure thing that NASA didn't think of that.