Something is happening beneath the surface of Mars that causes substantial amounts of methane gas to burst out regularly, a discovery that NASA scientists say represents the strongest indication so far that life might exist, or once existed, on the planet.
Principal investigator Michael Mumma, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said the detection does not mean that life definitely exists on Mars, because the gas can be produced by subsurface geological or chemical processes as well.
Nevertheless, "we believe this definitely increases the prospects for finding life on Mars," said Mumma, whose findings are being published online today by Science Express.
The scientists detected plumes of methane during two Martian summers, when the planet's large formations of subsurface ice might melt and release the gas.
Most of the methane in Earth's atmosphere is produced by bacteria in living creatures large and small. Even if it turns out that the Martian methane is the result of nonbiological processes, that would nonetheless reshape thinking about the planet, which scientists thought to be geologically dead and chemically unlikely to produce much of the gas.
The new data were gleaned by NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility atop Mauna Kea on Hawaii and another telescope in Chile.
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