After all the hooplah yesterday about this new Mars announcement, including my own over-excited meanderings – preserved for posterity below – here’s a sober account of the methane plumes of Mars from New Scientist
Methane gas in the Martian atmosphere is concentrated in three specific regions, according to the most sensitive measurements yet made. The discovery will likely stoke further debate on the source of the gas, which could be created through geological processes but might be tantalising evidence of life below the Martian surface.
Since methane was first discovered on Mars in 2003, three teams have found signatures of the gas using ground-based telescopes as well as Europe’s Mars Express orbiter.
[my original over-excited posting follows]
The Sun, of all places, seems to be the first international newspaper to be breaking this news… perhaps they got a healthy sales spike with the UFO vs wind turbine story last week.
Apparently NASA will today make an announcement about the discovery of methane in the Mars atmosphere. I’ll post up more news as it appears, though I expect this will be everywhere if it happens.
One member of the original 1976 Viking Lander team, Gilbert Levin, has always insisted that their experiments detected microbial life on the Red Planet, and publically restated it in 2001, though nobody paid him much attention.
And this just in from our correspondent in Deep Space, well Halifax, Tim Chapman:
” I’ve a strong feeling of ‘Hmmm…’ about this, if only because we’ve known about the methane for nearly five years and the rest seems extremely hypothetical. It’ll be ‘Wind turbine felled by farting aliens’ next…”
So why is NASA making a big newsday out of this one? Is it because major changes are being threatened by the new Obama administration?
ALIEN microbes living just below the Martian soil are responsible for a haze of methane around the Red Planet, Nasa scientists believe. The gas, belched in vast quantities in our world by cows, was detected by orbiting spacecraft and from Earth using giant telescopes.
Nasa are today expected to confirm its presence during a briefing at their Washington HQ. And the find is seen as exciting new evidence that Martian microbes are still alive today.
Some scientists reckon methane is also produced by volcanic processes. But there are NO known active volcanoes on Mars.