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Mars NASA Science

NASA Rover on Mars Detects Puff of Gas That Hints at Possibility of Life (nytimes.com) 117

Posted by msmash from the keeping-hopes-alive dept.
The Curiosity mission's scientists picked up the signal this week, and are seeking additional readings from the red planet. From a report: Mars, it appears, is belching a large amount of a gas that could be a sign of microbes living on the planet today. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.] In a measurement taken on last Wednesday, NASA's Curiosity rover discovered startlingly high amounts of methane in the Martian air, a gas that on Earth is usually produced by living things. The data arrived back on Earth on last Thursday, and by Friday in the week, scientists working on the mission were excitedly discussing the news, which has not yet been announced by NASA. "Given this surprising result, we've reorganized the weekend to run a follow-up experiment," Ashwin R. Vasavada, the project scientist for the mission, wrote to the science team in an email that was obtained by The Times.

The mission's controllers on Earth sent new instructions to the rover on Friday to follow up on the readings, bumping previously planned science work. The results of these observations are expected back on the ground later today. People have long been fascinated by the possibility of aliens on Mars. But NASA's Viking landers in the 1970s photographed a desolate landscape. Two decades later, planetary scientists thought Mars might have been warmer, wetter and more habitable in its youth some 4 billion years ago. Now, they are entertaining the notion that if life ever did arise on Mars, its microbial descendants could have migrated underground and persisted.
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NASA Rover on Mars Detects Puff of Gas That Hints at Possibility of Life More

NASA Rover on Mars Detects Puff of Gas That Hints at Possibility of Life

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  • Smell? (Score:4, Funny)

    by dcw3 ( 649211 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @11:07AM (#58814080) Journal

    Was it a fart? Clearly proof of life.

    • I was wondering the same thing. Shoot, I wondered if they lit a match on the fart to see if it would flame out!

    • Re:Smell? (Score:4, Informative)

      by ortholattice ( 175065 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @11:30AM (#58814212)
      Methane is odorless. The smell is usually caused by volatile sulfur compounds like hydrogen sulfide and methyl mercaptan.

      • Odorless and tasteless are pretty arbitrary.
        E.g. alcohol is considered tasteless, and I can taste it, so ... go figure.

        • Can you detect alcohol at a 1% concentration in water? Pretty unlikely. I'll grant that most people can detect the difference between 40% alcohol in water (the normal strength for vodka) because it changes the osmotic balance of the mucosa cells, triggering nerve firing - but not the taste receptors as such.

          40% methane in air (to be a little stricter, 40% methane / 20% oxygen / balance nitrogen) would possibly be detectable as methane is a weak anaesthetic. But as long as you didn't spark it (the Lower Exp

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DeBaas ( 470886 )

      oops, my bad..

      Marvin

    • I would check Curiosity's logs for any anomalous gaseous events...for he who smelt it, dealt it.

    • "Was it a fart? Clearly proof of life."

      The rover who smelled it dealt it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dcw3 ( 649211 )

      Oh, and my very first first post...after ALL these years.

    • Re:Smell? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @01:52PM (#58815566)
      Methane (CH4) has a fairly high Gibbs standard energy of formation [libretexts.org]. That means it sits pretty high up on the chemical potential energy curve. When it randomly bounces around and encounters other molecules, it will tend to want to react with them to form other substances with a lower Gibbs standard energy (go down the potential energy curve). Exceptions like in gas giants only happen when nearly everything else is at a higher chemical energy potential.

      On a planet with a large amount of CO2 (which is far lower in Gibbs standard energy than CH4), it'd be highly unusual for methane to remain. It would tend to want to randomly recombine to form into other molecules with lower potential energy. So if you detect large amounts of it in concentrated form, that suggests some process which is adding energy to the system (going up the potential energy curve) rather than extracting it (sliding down the potential energy curve). In other words, detecting a large amount of methane is like finding a large round boulder sitting on a steep mountain slope - you have to ask why it didn't roll down the mountain on its own. Something must either be preventing it from falling, or must have pushed it up.

      The processes which push chemicals up the potential energy curve are usually associated with life. Natural processes (random bouncing around) tend to push chemical reactions down the chemical potential energy curve. Life tends to push chemical reactions up the curve. e.g. The methane we get from oil wells is thought to come from ancient plants. The plants collected sunlight, using that energy to break apart CO2 and H2O (going up the potential energy curve) to form (CH2O)n - hydrocarbons. Then the plant died and was buried. Over time the hydrocarbons broke down into coal, oil, and methane gas, which we then mine/drill and burn to extract that solar energy captured by plants eons ago (push it back down the potential energy curve). Finding it on Mars makes you wonder, "where the hell did it come from?" Since you'd expect any natural methane left over from the planet's formation to have reacted with other materials and disappeared over billions of years.

      • Thank you for the excellent explanation!

      • So if you detect large amounts of it in concentrated form,

        The detection was at 20-odd parts per billion (ppb) in the predominantly CO2 atmosphere. For comparison, the Earth's atmosphere typically runs at about 1850 ppb (with around 50ppb variation with season and location).

        (I routinely have people trying to tell me that their gas analysis equipment can detect methane at parts per billion level, who then get very upset because I ask them to measure today's atmospheric methane concentration at our location

    • Being that methane seems to ebb and flow rather unpredictably, I would suspect volcanic activity over life. There are hints of recent volcanism on Mars based on geological studies. [wikipedia.org]

  • From the days of seeing canals through telescopes to the false positive about 10 years ago , any evidence of life usually turns out to be nothing of the sort. I won't hold my breath on this one, its probably just some unusual chemical reaction in the unusual soil.

    • Well, if it is a far and it smells. I sure as hell would hold my breath.
      • if it is a fart I meant to say.
    • Sounds like someone's looking for funding.
      • No, sounds like scientists are doing an amazing job exploring harsh environment of Mars with little money they receive for such a difficult task:

        ... The finding came from the rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) tunable laser spectrometer. It's exciting because microbial life is an important source of methane on Earth, but methane can also be created through interactions between rocks and water.

        From: NASA JPL [nasa.gov]

        And people currently living on Earth might be the first in history to witness (and learn about)

      • Sounds like someone's looking for funding.

        And it's likely they'll get funded if they tell this administration that Mars could be exploitable for fracking.

    • The Starfleet already put their mark [twitter.com] on Mars.

  • too, there was another jetting out of gas from the distant planet. I saw it. A reddish flash at the edge, the slightest projection of the outline just as the chronometer struck midnight; and at that I told Ogilvy and he took my place. ...

    He pointed out to me how unlikely it was that organic evolution had taken the same direction in the two adjacent planets.

    "The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one," he said.

  • We've been sending robots on Mars since the seventies. And all we got from that was decades of "might"s, "could be"s and "possibility of"s.

    Had we sent people there, we would have known within weeks, if not days.

    Tell me again why sending humans into space is a waste of time ?

    • If we had spent even 10% as much on robotic missions as it would take to finance a human mission, we'd also have known by now whether there's life on Mars.

    • We've been sending robots on Mars since the seventies. And all we got from that was decades of "might"s, "could be"s and "possibility of"s.

      Had we sent people there, we would have known within weeks, if not days.

      Tell me again why sending humans into space is a waste of time ?

      If we sent people there we would know for certain that there was life on mars... because we would have sent it there. Humans are bacteria farms. No way to prevent us spreading bacteria all over mars (we probably already have on our rovers even though we try to sanitize them). They may no longer be alive, but we almost certainly spread bacteria around the moon when we went.

      That said, you're right, a manned missions would be more likely to uncover life that was not terran in origin too, our machines just

      • Actually, it's a near certainty that there is life on Mars - which we sent in various landers. But the semantic quibble isn't worth having.

    • Had we sent people there, we would have known within weeks, if not days.

      Weeks or days doesn't make much difference when it takes decades to put people on Mars.

  • Given that you have an alternative, why lead with the pay-walled article? Or is there a reason you aren't admitting to?

    • That's probably what was in the submission - with the editor (contrary to Slashdot's regular abuse) having added the non-paywalled version. I've had the same done to my submissions too, but generally I am careful to put links to Open Access papers rather than paywalled journalism.

  • There, I said it.

  • Did anyone make a fart joke yet? hahahahaha. I'm so original!
  • Instead of one puff of gas leading to assumptions this should lead to and hint that more sensor readings are necessary, not assumptions

  • Life? (Score:2)

    by PPH ( 736903 )

    When we smell gas, the first question is, "What just died?"

  • Methane is found in the atmosphere of Titan, and is thought to bubble up from cryovolcanoes. Those aren't known to be on Mars, AFAIK, but this might be evidence that there are. Methane is also found in the atmospheres of Uranus (yup) and a few other planets/moons in our solar system, and there are known processes that produce it aside from life, so it's weak evidence of life at best. Oh, and we've discovered Methane on Mars several times in the past.

  • Perhaps time to consider a speedbump in discussions about the "evolution" of life on other planets. The origination of DNA based life forms by random chance is pretty easily demonstrated to be a near mathematical impossibility. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    • It was hard, but the quality of argument and presentation from creationists is actually going down with time. Or maybe they're getting more deranged with time and less able to tell how deranged they are.

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