WHAT little atmosphere Mars has is made mostly of carbon dioxide. It is, however, spiced with a few other ingredients—including, recent studies have claimed, methane. The concentrations are minuscule. But the gas has nevertheless caused excitement among planetary scientists; its presence could be evidence that Mars is not quite as dead as is often supposed, in either the geological sense or the biological one.
On June 7th, in the pages of Science, a team led by Christopher Webster of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a facility in California that does planetary science for NASA, reported the most precise results yet. Instruments aboard Curiosity, a Mars rover, which have been sniffing the air for three Martian years (55 Earthly months), reported an average level of 0.41 parts per billion (ppb). That is a number low enough that it might be explained by the chemical breakdown of the smidgens of organic matter which fall to the surface of Mars in the form of meteoritic dust....Continue reading
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