Evidence of methane is one of the potential markers to indicate life once existed on the Red Planet.
The discovery of life on Mars would get pretty much everyone excited. But the scientists hunting for it would probably be happy no matter what the outcome of their search—whether life turned out to extinct, dormant or extant. They’d even consider finding no evidence of life whatsoever to be an important discovery.
Double detectionThe new research used archived data acquired between 2012 and 2014 by the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer aboard Mars Express, which studies the composition of the planet’s atmosphere through the infrared radiation that is reflected and emitted by the planet. This is the same instrument that first detected low levels of methane in Mars’ atmosphere in 2004.
The spectrometer on Mars Express was tracking the Gale Crater before, during and after Curiosity’s detection. Excitingly, it also detected elevated levels of methane in the region—the first time that a simultaneous detection of methane at the surface and in the atmosphere has occurred. This, perhaps, makes the new measurement more reliable than the previous detections.
But the new study does not attempt to make any conclusions about the origin of the methane. However, the authors do comment that their findings, especially in corroborating the Curiosity data, suggest that the methane release is more likely to be by small, short events, rather than episodic large exhalations. Indeed, it could be speculated that small events are more likely than large ones if Mars turns out to experience the “marsquakes” that the Insight mission is programmed to detect.
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