WASHINGTON - DM - After a year roaming the surface of Mars, Nasa has failed to find any evidence that its atmosphere is supporting life, it was revealed today.
The Curiosity rover currently scanning the Red Planet has not detected any methane, a gas that is produced by living things.
Since landing in Gale Crater last year, every morning and evening the car-size probe has analysed Mars’ air and scanned it with a tiny laser in search of the greenhouse gas.
Not finding it means that it is unlikely that microbes capable of producing the gas are living below the planet’s surface, scientists said today. NASA had high hopes that the rover would inhale methane after orbiting spacecraft and Earth-based telescopes detected plumes of the gas several years ago. On Earth, most of the gas is a by-product of life, spewed when animals digest or plants decay.
‘If you had microbial life somewhere on Mars that was really healthy and cranking away, you might see some of the signatures of that in the atmosphere,’ said mission scientist Paul Mahaffy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
During Curiosity’s first eight months on the red planet, it probed the air during the day and at night as the season changed from spring to summer.
‘Every time we looked, we never saw it,’ said Christopher Webster, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who led the research published online in the journal Science. Webster said while the result was ‘disappointing in many ways,’ the hunt for the elusive gas continues. While methane is linked to living things, it can also be made by non-biological processes.
Mars today is a hostile place - extremely dry and constantly bombarded by radiation. Billions of years ago, the planet boasted a thicker atmosphere and possible lakes. Scientists generally agree that nothing can exist on the Martian surface at present since it’s too toxic. If there are living things on Mars, scientists theorize they’re likely underground.
Just because Curiosity didn’t detect methane near its landing site doesn’t mean the gas is not present elsewhere on the planet, said Bill Nye, chief executive of the Planetary Society, a space advocacy group.