The plot thickens.
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 evening and vanish through the day.
Through the years, the rover’s Pattern Evaluation at Mars (SAM) instrument has repeatedly detected important concentrations of the gasoline, generally 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, on condition that dwelling creatures produce methane right here on Earth, giving the findings particular significance as NASA scans the Crimson Planet for indicators of subterranean life.
However whereas we’re nonetheless removed from with 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 exhausting 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 at the moment and discovering that temperature and air strain fluctuations brought on a seal to type, trapping gases beneath a stunning layer of solidified salt, as detailed in a brand new paper printed within the Journal of Geophysical Analysis: Planets.
The experiments had been initially designed to check whether or not micro organism referred to as halophiles might survive within the salt-rich environments of Mars.
Pavlov and his colleagues steered 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 evening.
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 12 months because of the wealth of different jobs Curiosity is tasked with.
“Methane experiments are useful resource intensive, so we’ve to be very strategic after we resolve to do them,” SAM principal investigator Charles Malespin informed NASA.
In different phrases, we’ll must be affected person till we are able to discover out extra.
“Among the methane work must 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
