News coverage of potential present day habitats of life on Mars: Difference between revisions
News coverage of potential present day habitats of life on Mars (edit)
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* [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/12/martian-methane-spotted-2004-has-mysteriously-vanished Martian methane—spotted in 2004 — has mysteriously vanished] - ScienceMag (December 12 2018)
==April 2, 2019 - Mars methane surge spotted from space - BBC==
{{quote|A strong signal of methane was measured by the Curiosity rover on 15 June 2013.
The measurement was confirmed in data collected the next day by the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) on board Mars Express.
...
If microbes still exist, they are one possible source. Methane produced by micro-organisms in the distant past could also get trapped within ice. When the ice melts, it could then release the ancient methane into the atmosphere.
But there are geological processes that can produce methane, and don't require biology. These include serpentinisation - a process of mineral alteration in the crust involving heat and water. Methane can be made as a downstream product of serpentinisation.
Marco Giuranna suspects the plume didn't originate from Gale Crater.
Scientists scrutinised the region around Gale for features where gas seepage is expected.
This process is well known on Earth to occur along tectonic faults and from natural gas fields.
"We identified tectonic faults that might extend below a region proposed to contain shallow ice. Since permafrost is an excellent seal for methane, it is possible that the ice here could trap subsurface methane and release it episodically along the faults that break through this ice," said Giuseppe Etiope from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome, a co-author on one of the studies.
"Remarkably, we saw that the atmospheric simulation and geological assessment, performed independently of each other, suggested the same region of provenance of the methane."
}}
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47788451 Mars methane surge spotted from space]
==April 10, 2019 So where did the Mars methane go? - BBC==
{{Quote|"If we take the previous measurements at face value, and we obviously believe our own results - then there's something going on in the atmosphere between those two points in time, and it's something we don't predict.
"We expect methane to hang around in the atmosphere of Mars for hundreds of years. It's destroyed by sunlight, but it's destroyed over relatively long time-scales in terms of human observation. Whatever was there before should still be there today, even if at a diluted level."
...
Some sort of chemical interaction would be one answer, but Håkan Svedhem, the European Space Agency's project scientist on TGO, says people shouldn't be downhearted about the prospects for life on the planet if methane is eventually determined not to be present.
"We've got a bit fixated by methane because on Earth we all know that more than 95% of the methane comes from biological sources. But there are abundant forms of life that do not produce methane," he told BBC News.
}}
* [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47878138 So where did the Mars methane go?]
== See also==
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