Scientists Face The Fact Of Mars Methane

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<b>Scientists Face The Fact Of Mars Methane </b><br /><br />LINK<br /><br />There is methane on Mars, scientists have concluded from the latest data. And one group of researchers argue there may be a lot more methane being produced than previously thought.<br /><br />Methane is of great interest because on Earth, almost all of it comes from living things - everything from rotting plants to bovine flatulence. But there are other possible sources of methane on Mars. <br /><br />While one researcher, Vladimir Krasnopolsky at Catholic University of America, argued that those other sources are so unlikely that the methane must be biologically produced, most scientists at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, said they are concentrating on the non-biological mechanisms.<br /><br />Whatever is creating the gas, these reports have dissipated the initial scepticism that met early reports of Martian methane over the past year.<br /><br />Methane does not survive long in the Red Planet’s atmosphere, so the source must be recent. One idea is that Mars was struck very recently by a comet containing frozen methane. <br /><br />Though such strikes are relatively rare, Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, US, has calculated that gas from a comet with only 2% methane content could persist on Mars for up to 2000 years. This could produce atmospheric levels of methane comparable to the roughly 60 parts per billion detected by astrobiologist Michael Mumma at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and his colleagues. <br /><br />Alternatively, the gas could be buried in methane-ice mixes called clathrates, perhaps being released by geothermally melted water and bubbling up to the surface through natural pores and cracks in Mars’s crust. While not a sign of life itself, it might indicate a place where life could survive. <br /><br /><br />Double lines <br />