NASA Rover Fails to Turn Up Methane On Mars 106
The Washington Post is one of many sources to report the possibly disappointing news that NASA's Curiosity rover has failed to find any methane on Mars. "[NASA planetary scientist Michael] Mumma had high hopes for a positive result because he and his colleagues believe they have detected methane on Mars remotely, from telescopes on Earth that can discern the chemical nature of Mars’s atmosphere. A European orbiter around Mars also spotted methane. But the methane has proved ephemeral — now you see it, now you don’t. Mumma said he and his colleagues are reviewing their work to see if there is some error in the mix. Perhaps the methane simply disappears quickly on Mars, through some unknown chemical process. 'It’s possible that we don’t understand something that’s going on in the Martian atmosphere,' said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.'"
Roundtable discussion (Score:4, Interesting)
As I remember from a discussion we had on Friday the methane detection claim has been held in some doubt because he didn't take the redshift/blueshift context into account. It's likely the ground observation just saw the methane in Earth's atmosphere. The satellite observation is harder to explain -- if the methane was there and disappeared, the forces making it go away would have to be over a hundred times more powerful than it is on Earth, a planet with a much more volatile atmosphere.
Re:Poor NASA (Score:3, Interesting)