More Mars Methane: Curiosity Rover Spots Biggest Surge Yet
By Mike Wall 24 June 2019
The rover detected methane levels more than 30 times above normal last week.
This image was taken by the left Navcam on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on June 18, 2019. It shows part of "Teal Ridge," which the rover has been studying within a region called the "clay-bearing unit."
(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech)
NASA's Curiosity rover has sniffed out another surge of the potentially life-indicating gas methane on Mars, and this one is the biggest yet.
The six-wheeled robot detected methane levels around 21 parts per billion per unit volume (ppbv) last week inside the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater, NASA officials announced yesterday (June 23). That's far higher than the normal background concentration at Gale, which Curiosity has determined ranges seasonally from about 0.24 ppbv to 0.65 ppbv.
The new result is exciting, because the vast majority of methane in Earth's air is generated by microbes and other organisms. But we can't assume Martians were involved. Methane can also be produced abiotically — via the reaction of hot water with certain types of rock, for example.
"With our current measurements, we have no way of telling if the methane source is biology or geology, or even ancient or modern," Paul Mahaffy, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. Mahaffy is principal investigator of Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which detected the recent surge.
More:
https://www.space.com/amp/curiosity-mars-rover-highest-levels-methane.html?utm_source=notification
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