Scientists have wondered for over 50 years if Mars contained and was emitting Methane. Now, a spike in methane has scientists puzzled. Did the spike come from the Red Planet or was it simply caused by the rovers scouring the planet?
Most methane on Earth is caused from living things, and this new spike of methane levels on Mars means there is some type of life on the Red Planet, be it geological or biological life. The mysterious plume of methane that was discovered vanished a few years ago leaving researchers wondering exactly what caused this gaseous release.
NASA's Curiosity rover has sampled methane on Mars on six separate occasions between October 2012 and June 2013. During that time, Curiosity detected a burst of the gas in four measurements over a period of four months.
"I am convinced that they really are seeing methane," said Kevin Zahnle, a scientist at NASA's Ames Researcher Center in Moffett Field, California, who was not involved with the discovery. "But I'm thinking that it has to be coming from the rover."
Chris Webster, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and lead author of the recent Mars methane study, said that there still isn't exact evidence pointing to the rover being the culprit.
"And while it's true that the concentration of methane in that chamber is 1,000 times higher than in Mars' atmosphere, the comparison is actually misleading."
"You have to look at the amount of methane, not the concentration," Webster says. "The concentration of methane on the rover may seem high, but the actual amount is very small because the chamber is very small. To produce the amount we detected in Mars' atmosphere, you'd need a gas bottle of pure methane leaking from the rover. And we simply don't have it."
Paul Mahaffy, the principle investigator on Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) suite of instruments, believes that it can't be the rover as the methane traces haven't been consistent each time they were measured.
"There are a few areas that are sealed," Mahaffy says. "They could, in theory, be a source if some methane had made its way into them and was then leaking out, but we've looked very hard for other sources and we haven't identified any."
Despite these hypotheses, scientists simply do not know what caused these spikes and continues to look for clues for both geological and biological life on the Red Planet to perhaps explain this spike in methane. Who knows, maybe there is life in some form or another hiding somewhere on the planet.
