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An Odyssey of Mars Science: Part 3
Sacramento - Feb 12, 2004 However, another DPS poster reported very intriguing if tentative positive news on the question of Martian life. Methane in Mars' air is broken down very quickly by UV light, so the discovery of even the tiniest trace of it there would indicate that it's being produced at a much higher rate than any possible nonliving source of it could do -- and that it must therefore be produced by underground living microbes. Up to now, we have only been able to say that methane must make up less than one part in 50 million of Mars' air. But a DPS poster by Michael J. Mumma of Goddard Space Flight Center reported that his preliminary search with both of two ground-based infrared telescopes has turned up intriguing signs of what may be an spectral line in exactly the right place for methane. Furthermore, it seems to be more intense in one of the places where Mars Odyssey has discovered surprising amounts of what seems to be near-surface ice at the equator. One of the two telescopes also covers the spectral range in which a second methane line exists, and appears to show that one too -- but further analysis of that particular data is necessary to rule out other possible causes. If this is confirmed, though, it would be sensational -- serious evidence that Mars still has living microbes on it. Meanwhile, a poster by John J. Caldwell of York University reported his similar search for methane using the "NICMOS" IR spectrometer on the Hubble Space Telescope -- along with his simultaneous search for tiny traces of sulfur dioxide, an indicator of present-day Martian volcanic activity, using its "STIS" UV spectrometer instrument. (Up to now, we've only been able to place an upper limit of part in 10 million for SO2 in Mars' air.) Unfortunately, STIS' particular "CCD" detector which he used for the purpose turns out to suffer from grating scatter effects which rule out using it to look for the spectral lines of SO2 -- but Caldwell is still in the process of analyzing NICMOS' data for methane, and he also plans to repeat his UV search for SO2 using STIS' other set of "MAMA" detectors, which don't suffer from its CCD's detector vulnerability to grating scatter. If the tiny British "Beagle 2" craft survives its touchdown this Christmas Eve to become the fourth successful lander on Mars, its onboard mass spectrometer will carry out an even more sensitive in-situ search for traces of these atmospheric gases -- and if Beagle fails, NASA's 2008 "Phoenix" lander in Mars' north polar-region will repeat the experiment. And the entire intense effort by the US to explore Mars, emphasizing the possibility for ancient or present-day life on it, continues -- as does the attempt to plan it properly in advance, given both the cost limits and the fact that at least one such mission is scheduled to be launched at every Earth-Mars launch opportuinty, a frenzied flight rate of once every two Earth years that makes it much harder to take the data actually coming in from present-day probes into account in time to properly plan the coming missions. Another poster at the DPS meeting -- Robert W. Easter's poster on the possibility and likelihood of various "momentous" new disccoveries that might possibly be made on Mars during this decade and have a radical effect on later exploration plans -- provided some fascinating new information on this. However, this poster's information so interlocks with other recent developments in the replanning of America's future Mars exploration effort that I've decided to delay discussion of it to a later article dealing with that whole subject. So, for now, in the next installment of this series I'll move on to an examination of several interesting DPS talks and posters concerning our other close planetary neighbor, Venus. Then it will be on to the asteroids.
Related Links 
Sacramento - Feb 12, 2004The new data from Mars Odyssey's GRS and THEMIS instruments, of course, are also providing information on some aspects of Mars that have nothing to do with the amount of liquid water that may have existed on its surface -- and William Boynton and Phil Christensen, during their lectures on the subject at the DPS meeting, mentioned these too. |
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