Did E.T. just belch?
A so-called “alien burp” may have been detected by NASA’s Curiosity rover while exploring Mars.
A group of scientists may have pinpointed the location of a mysterious source of Martian methane, a simple gas often produced by microbes.
Most of the methane in Earth’s own atmosphere has biological origins, according to the researchers, which suggests that the detection of methane on Mars may hint at life on the barren planet. According to Scientific American, between 90 and 95 percent of the methane in Earth’s atmosphere is “biological in origin,” such as cow and goat burps.
The Mars methane is likely not from the rover itself, as NASA checks the rover extensively.
Curiosity has detected these methane blips six times since landing in Mars’ Gale crater in 2012, but scientists could not find a source for them — perhaps until now.
Curiosity uses an instrument called the Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS) to measure methane concentration nearby. On these six occasions, methane levels rose to 10 parts per billion (ppb) — and one time rose to 15 ppb. The TLS can detect trace quantities of the gas at less than one-half part per billion, roughly equivalent to a pinch of salt in an Olympic-size swimming pool
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology modeled the methane gas particles by separating them into groups. The team traced the methane particles to their potential points of emission by looking at wind speed and the direction in which they were moving upon detection. The researchers determined that one of the likely methane sources was just a few dozen miles away from the rover.
“[The findings] point to an active emission region to the west and the southwest of the Curiosity rover on the northwestern crater floor,” the researchers wrote in the paper. “This may invoke a coincidence that we selected a landing site for Curiosity that is located next to an active methane emission site.”
Methane has a detectable life span of 330 years, meaning that whatever produced the methane in the first place may still be producing it today.
“If we trust the methane abundances detected by both TLS and TGO and accept the 330-year methane lifetime from known photochemistry, our back-trajectory modeling for atmospheric transport strongly supports surface-emission sites in the vicinity of the Curiosity rover in northwestern Gale crater,” the researchers concluded in the paper.
It is also possible that methane is being produced by non-biological processes. But these findings can imply geological activity indicative of the presence of liquid water.
Curiosity might also just be located near a local methane source — perhaps due to some subsurface phenomenon — which may suggest that there is no atmospheric methane on Mars.
Curiosity has taken more than 800,000 pictures while traversing over 16 miles and spending 3,179 sols — Martian days — on its mission.
Although the study has yet to be peer-reviewed, the results are one step closer to discovering life on Mars.
“This would make this site interesting to visit, or other similar sites that could have the same properties,” Håkan Svedhem, the project scientist for the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), said in an interview with New Scientist.
These findings further the conclusions of other studies that aliens reside on the red planet. Last year, researchers hypothesized that alien life may have once existed miles beneath the surface of Mars. Another study claimed that microscopic aliens may come to Earth from Mars. And NASA even advanced the idea that alien life might be hiding in ancient caves on the red planet.