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Big News From Mars Rover (1 Viewer)

'jamny said:
It'll just be proof of water in the past. All evidence has pointed towards it but proof would still be big news.
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Methane. Is produced by organic life, which will heavily suggest Mars was at some point populated by, at a minimum, bacteria.
 
Footsteps in the sand next to the rover in some pictures. But in others, there will be no rover tracks and only foot prints. When the rover breaks down, evangelists will blame it on homosexuality.

 
It's nothing. Probably.

The quote heard around the world came shortly after [scientist John] Grotzinger explained that NASA had just received the initial data from Curiosity’s first soil experiment using a new Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which is capable of identifying organic compounds.

Naturally, the public assumed that this meant Curiosity had discovered a complex organic molecule. But while NASA does have the latest soil samples, the mission team tells Mashable that researchers haven’t determined that particular groundbreaking discovery. In fact the rover drove away from the location just five days later, taking more samples along the way.

What Grotzinger was actually trying to convey is that Curiosity’s data over her entire two-year mission will further our knowledge of Mars more than ever before, making it a historical mission. This is entirely factual. In her short time on the Red Planet, Curiosity has already made significant discoveries — like finding an ancient streambed where water once flowed. More recently, she determined that astronauts could survive Mars radiation levels.
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'Sarnoff said:
It's nothing. Probably.

The quote heard around the world came shortly after [scientist John] Grotzinger explained that NASA had just received the initial data from Curiosity’s first soil experiment using a new Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which is capable of identifying organic compounds.

Naturally, the public assumed that this meant Curiosity had discovered a complex organic molecule. But while NASA does have the latest soil samples, the mission team tells Mashable that researchers haven’t determined that particular groundbreaking discovery. In fact the rover drove away from the location just five days later, taking more samples along the way.

What Grotzinger was actually trying to convey is that Curiosity’s data over her entire two-year mission will further our knowledge of Mars more than ever before, making it a historical mission. This is entirely factual. In her short time on the Red Planet, Curiosity has already made significant discoveries — like finding an ancient streambed where water once flowed. More recently, she determined that astronauts could survive Mars radiation levels.
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Coverup

 
Is the big news the water ice and frozen organics found on MERCURY, the planet closest to the sun?

Link

 
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Yeah, I also vote cover-up. The original guy was not talking about the entire mission, he had something specific in mind.

 
By KENNETH CHANG

DEC. 16, 2014



Continue reading the main story


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Continue reading the main story

Resurrecting speculation that microbes could be living on Mars today, NASA’s Curiosity rover has recorded a burst of methane gas that persisted for at least two months, scientists reported on Tuesday.

The scientists also reported that for the first time, they confirmed the presence of carbon-based organic molecules in a rock sample. The organics can be produced by geological processes and are not directly signs of life, but they add to the picture that Mars potentially had, or maybe even still has, all the ingredients for life.

The presence of methane, however brief, is perplexing, because it does not last long. Calculations indicate that sunlight and chemical reactions in the Martian air would break up the molecules within a few hundred years, so anything there now must have been created recently.

The two mostly likely candidates are a geological process known as serpentinization (which requires both heat and liquid water) and life — a class of microbes that produce methane.

Continue reading the main story

RELATED COVERAGE

“It is one of the few hypotheses that we can propose that we must consider,” said John P. Grotzinger, the project scientist for the mission.

Continue reading the main story
INTERACTIVE FEATURE

28 Months on Mars
NASA’s Curiosity rover has found evidence of lakes and streams on a warmer, wetter, habitable Mars.




OPEN INTERACTIVE FEATURE

Even if the explanation for the methane turns out to be geological, the hydrothermal systems would still be prime locations to search for signs of life.

The findings, announced at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, are a 180-degree flip from a year ago, when mission scientists said that Curiosity had found no signs of methane.

But then in a measurement in July last year, the methane jumped to almost six parts per billion by volume — still sparse, but about 10 times what Curiosity had detected earlier. Still, with the uncertainty in the measurement — give or take 4.5 parts per billion — the scientists were not sure what that meant.

A week later, the methane level had dropped by more than half. Within the margin of error, the reading was compatible with no methane.

In the next measurement, on Nov. 29, 2013, methane jumped again, and stayed high through at least the end of January.

Then it fell once again, below one part per billion.

The scientists also report their findings in an article published this week by the journal Science.

A decade ago, three teams of scientists reported that they had detected methane in the Martian atmosphere — two using observations from Earth, one using the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter.

All of the measurements were at the edge of sensitivity, and the methane appeared to disappear a couple of years later. If true, that meant that not only was something creating methane on Mars, but something else was quickly destroying it.

Many Mars scientists decided that a simpler solution to the methane mystery was that the measurements were mistaken.


 
By KENNETH CHANG

DEC. 16, 2014
Resurrecting speculation that microbes could be living on Mars today, NASA’s Curiosity rover has recorded a burst of methane gas that persisted for at least two months, scientists reported on Tuesday.

The scientists also reported that for the first time, they confirmed the presence of carbon-based organic molecules in a rock sample. The organics can be produced by geological processes and are not directly signs of life, but they add to the picture that Mars potentially had, or maybe even still has, all the ingredients for life.

The presence of methane, however brief, is perplexing, because it does not last long. Calculations indicate that sunlight and chemical reactions in the Martian air would break up the molecules within a few hundred years, so anything there now must have been created recently.

The two mostly likely candidates are a geological process known as serpentinization (which requires both heat and liquid water) and life — a class of microbes that produce methane. Even if the explanation for the methane turns out to be geological, the hydrothermal systems would still be prime locations to search for signs of life.

The findings, announced at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, are a 180-degree flip from a year ago, when mission scientists said that Curiosity had found no signs of methane.

But then in a measurement in July last year, the methane jumped to almost six parts per billion by volume — still sparse, but about 10 times what Curiosity had detected earlier. Still, with the uncertainty in the measurement — give or take 4.5 parts per billion — the scientists were not sure what that meant.

A week later, the methane level had dropped by more than half. Within the margin of error, the reading was compatible with no methane. In the next measurement, on Nov. 29, 2013, methane jumped again, and stayed high through at least the end of January. Then it fell once again, below one part per billion.

The scientists also report their findings in an article published this week by the journal Science.

A decade ago, three teams of scientists reported that they had detected methane in the Martian atmosphere — two using observations from Earth, one using the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter.

All of the measurements were at the edge of sensitivity, and the methane appeared to disappear a couple of years later. If true, that meant that not only was something creating methane on Mars, but something else was quickly destroying it.

Many Mars scientists decided that a simpler solution to the methane mystery was that the measurements were mistaken.
Click to expand...
eta :wall: :wall:

 
Last edited by a moderator:
SAN FRANCISCO — Life on Mars? Today? The notion may not be so far-fetched after all.

A year after reporting that NASA’s Curiosity rover had found no evidence of methane gas on Mars, dashing the best hope that organisms might be living there now, scientists reversed themselves on Tuesday.

Curiosity has now recorded a burst of methane that lasted at least two months.

For now, scientists have just two possible explanations for the methane. One is that it is the waste product of certain living microbes.

“It is one of the few hypotheses that we can propose that we must consider as we go forward,” said John P. Grotzinger, the mission’s project scientist.

The scientists also reported that for the first time, they confirmed the presence of carbon-based organic molecules in a rock sample. The so-called organics are not direct signs of life, past or present, but they lend weight to the possibility that Mars had the ingredients required for life, and may even still have them.

“This is really a great moment for the mission,” Dr. Grotzinger told a news conference here at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

The presence of methane is significant because the gas cannot exist in the air for long. Calculations indicate that sunlight and chemical reactions in the Martian atmosphere would break up the molecules within a few hundred years, so any methane there now must have been created recently.

It could have been created by a geological process known as serpentinization, which requires both heat and liquid water. Or it could be a product of life in the form of microbes known as methanogens, which release methane as a waste product.

Even if the explanation for the methane turns out to be geological, the hydrothermal systems would still be prime locations to search for signs of life.

Scientists have always expected that some tiny amount of methane would be found on Mars. Cosmic dust falling on the planet contains organic compounds that are broken up by ultraviolet light from the sun, producing methane.

But the new findings, which are described in detail in a paper this week in the journal Science, are a 180-degree flip from a year ago, when mission scientists said that Curiosity had found no signs of methane, placing an upper limit of 1.3 parts per billion by volume.

Since then, the scientists refined their measurements, detecting a background level of 0.7 parts per billion. That is half of what was predicted, raising another mystery that somehow methane is also being destroyed.

But in November 2013, two months after the scientists reported the absence of methane on Mars, the rover measured methane levels 10 times as high. “It was an ‘oh my gosh’ moment,” said Christopher R. Webster of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lead author of the Science paper.

The methane levels stayed high through at least the end of January.

It subsequently fell, to less than one part per billion.

An earlier measurement in July had also been high, although it dropped by half a week later, and the margin of error made it unclear what was going on. Curiosity made no methane measurements between July and November 2013.

Sushil K. Atreya of the University of Michigan, a member of the science team, said it was possible that elevated methane levels lasted from July through January. “It could have been over six months,” he said, “but we don’t know that.”

Given its quick appearance and quick disappearance, mission scientists suspect the newly discovered methane was a relatively small burst.

A decade ago, three teams of scientists reported that they had detected methane in the Martian atmosphere — two using observations from Earth, one using the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter.

All of the measurements were at the edge of the instruments’ capabilities, and the methane appeared to disappear two years later. If true, that meant that not only was something creating methane on Mars, something else was quickly destroying it.

Many Mars scientists decided that a simpler solution to the methane mystery was that the measurements were mistaken, a conclusion bolstered by the absence reported by the Curiosity team last year.

Now, Dr. Grotzinger said, “It’s back on the table.”

Michael J. Mumma of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who led one of the teams that reported much larger methane plumes in the Mars atmosphere in 2003 based on measurements from Earth — and has found no methane since 2005 — said the new data was “pleasant” after years of doubts from critics.

The new Curiosity measurements “confirmed this startling reality that methane is being released, sporadically, and it is being destroyed quickly,” he said. “Both events are surprising.”

As for the organic molecules, they showed up in a mudstone nicknamed Cumberland that Curiosity drilled in May 2013.

Within Curiosity is a miniature chemistry laboratory that detected significant amounts of the organic molecule chlorobenzene, in much higher concentrations than had been seen in other rocks it had examined.

Scientists spent months analyzing whether the organic compounds came from Cumberland or contamination Curiosity had brought from Earth.

“You don’t want to be faked out,” Dr. Grotzinger said.

The scientists are still unsure whether Cumberland contained chlorobenzene, which is not a naturally occurring compound on Earth, or if that was the end product of chemical reactions involving other organic molecules in the rock as it was heated. But they convinced themselves that the organic carbon is Martian.

“In part, Curiosity was built to explore for organics,” Dr. Grotzinger said, “and we found them.”
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