Emission Management
NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover has made constant and puzzling findings whereas roaming the barren floor of the planet’s Gale Crater: mysterious puffs of methane gasoline that solely seem at night time and vanish through the day.
Over time, the rover’s Pattern Evaluation at Mars (SAM) instrument has repeatedly detected vital concentrations of the gasoline, typically spiking to 40 instances the same old ranges — and scientists are nonetheless attempting to determine the supply, as NASA particulars in a brand new weblog put up.
It is an particularly intriguing discovering, provided that dwelling creatures produce methane right here on Earth, giving the findings particular significance as NASA scans the Purple Planet for indicators of subterranean life.
However whereas we’re nonetheless removed from having the ability to inform as soon as and for all if Mars was as soon as — or maybe nonetheless is — teeming with life, NASA researchers are laborious at work investigating the phenomenon.
Planetary Indigestion
NASA planetary scientist Alexander Pavlov carried out a sequence of experiments, replicating the present circumstances in Gale Crater in the present day and discovering that temperature and air stress fluctuations induced a seal to kind, trapping gases beneath a stunning layer of solidified salt, as detailed in a brand new paper revealed within the Journal of Geophysical Analysis: Planets.
The experiments had been initially designed to check whether or not micro organism generally known as halophiles might survive within the salt-rich environments of Mars.
Pavlov and his colleagues urged that this layer might have been damaged up by the burden of Curiosity driving over it, which might clarify why the SAM instrument picked up spiking ranges of methane.
Even this fascinating discovering nonetheless cannot fairly clarify the odd seasonality of methane spikes, nor why they solely seem at night time.
Sadly, getting a greater image of how this gasoline is being launched over time is proving troublesome. SAM has to restrict its methane detection to only some instances a yr due to the wealth of different jobs Curiosity is tasked with.
“Methane experiments are useful resource intensive, so now we have to be very strategic after we determine to do them,” SAM principal investigator Charles Malespin advised NASA.
In different phrases, we’ll must be affected person till we are able to discover out extra.
“A few of the methane work should be left to future floor spacecraft which can be extra targeted on answering these particular questions,” Curiosity undertaking scientist at JPL Ashwin Vasavada added.
Extra on Curiosity: New NASA Rover Discovery Hints at Indicators of Life on Mars
