Enigmatic Methane On Mars – How Long It Lasts In Planet’s Atmosphere And What Is Its True Source

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – The largest amount of methane ever measured during the mission, has been recently detected on Mars by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover.

The ‘largest amount’ in this case means – about 21 parts per billion units by volume (ppbv). (One ppbv means that if you take a volume of air on Mars, one billionth of the volume of air is methane.)

Methane is often associated with living things and with life as we know it. On our planet, it’s produced by microbes and can be also created through interactions between rocks and water.

This image was taken by the left Navcam on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover on June 18, 2019, the 2,440th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. It shows part of “Teal Ridge,” which the rover has been studying within a region called the “clay-bearing unit.”Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech 

But what is the source of methane on Mars?

The findings were delivered by Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) tunable laser spectrometer.

Unfortunately, Curiosity doesn’t have instruments that can definitively say what the source of the methane is, or even if it’s coming from a local source within Gale Crater or elsewhere on the planet.

“With our current measurements, we have no way of telling if the methane source is biology or geology, or even ancient or modern,” SAM Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a press release.

Methane has been detected over the course of Curiosity’s mission on the Red Planet and the rover’s equipment has measured methane many times since it landed in Gale Crater in 2012.

The level of methane is usually low but this time, measurement is large and the science team knows very little about how long these transient plumes last or why they’re different from the seasonal patterns.

It is also known that the level of this gas seems to rise and fall as seasons change on Mars.

Scientific American wrote in one of its articles that “…methane’s lifetime on Mars is long enough for winds and diffusion to mix the gas into the atmosphere fairly uniformly. Thus, the observed variations of methane levels over the ­planet are puzzling. They may be a sign that the gas comes from localized sources or disappears into localized sinks. One possible sink is chemically reactive soil, which could accelerate the loss of methane. If such additional sinks operated, it would take an even larger source to maintain the observed abundance.

Now it’s important to continue gathering data to determine whether the source of methane on Mars is geological or biological. It’s also important to know how long methane lasts in the Martian atmosphere.

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff