Saturday, September 21, 2013

Ups, after methane on Mars is almost nonexistent - Público.pt

Until now, all the data indicate that Mars is a planet devoid of life. But the existence of microbial organisms hidden in the soil of the Red Planet is still a hypothesis sufficiently appealing, and little studied, to be on the table. The measurements made in the past plumes of methane in the Martian atmosphere allowed imagine that this gas was released by methanogenic microbes. These organisms are found in certain environments of the earth, and its metabolism produces methane as humans exhale carbon dioxide. But the results of experiments made by Curiosity seem to throw the case drain.

The NASA robot that walks through Martian soil for more than one Earth year, made several measurements of the amount of methane that exists in the atmosphere, one meter above the ground, in 2012 and 2013. For this, used a laser spectrometer that analyzes the gases existing in the air samples. The results are discouraging. “The upper limit of 1.3 shares [methane] per billion parts is significantly less than the amounts of methane measured by probes or from ground-based telescopes,” writes the team of Christopher Webster of Propulsion Laboratory jet, the California Institute of Technology, USA, in this article published Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science .

These analyzes past

different amounts of methane measured over the years and depending on the location of the analyzed planet. But the gas has a lifetime of several hundred years before being degraded by the sun, and scientists expected that dilution of this gas into the atmosphere a quantity of methane generate about six times higher than that found now.

For the researchers, “These results greatly reduce the likelihood of methanogenic microbial activity on Mars” or the production of this gas due to geological phenomena. It is still unknown about the methane that was identified in past experiences.

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