NASA Researchers Claim Evidence of Present Life on Mars

[gottaB]

WASHINGTON -- A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.

The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed.

What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.

Stoker and other researchers have long theorized that the Martian subsurface could harbor biological organisms that have developed unusual strategies for existing in extreme environments. That suspicion led Stoker and a team of U.S. and Spanish researchers in 2003 to southwestern Spain to search for subsurface life near the Rio Tinto river—so-called because of its reddish tint—the product of iron being dissolved in its highly acidic water.

NASA Researchers Claim Evidence of Present Life on Mars....

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That was posted in LBN. Putting a thread here for posterity.

See also:

• What's Up Below Martian Soil?
  
• Debate Heats up over Natural Gas on Mars
  
• Martian Methane Mystery
  

[kanrok]

1. Methane?

It's probably my deceased dog champ. He coulda made a wrong turn on the way to doggy heaven.

[purduejake]

2. So if we find life on mars...

What in the hell are churches going to do? Deny it?

[gottaB]

3. God only knows what some churches will say

:shrug:

[Sequoia]

4. No, send missionarie to save their souls from cold hell.

Seeing as how it's so hot on Mars these days.

[On the Road]

5. They're Holed Up in Caves!

Must be Martian terrorists.

[pmbryant]

6. Not much here. Looks overblown

Looks like ununconfirmed speculation, based on the article. But we've been speculating about life on Mars for centuries, so not much is new.

Here is a better article about Mars/life research: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7014

A leading European Space Agency scientist says he has found a gas in the Martian atmosphere that he believes can only be explained by the presence of life. But the few researchers who have been privy to the facts say that such a conclusion is premature.

Vittorio Formisano of the Institute of Physics and Interplanetary Science in Rome will be speaking next week at the first conference dedicated to the results from ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. The craft has been orbiting the Red Planet since December 2003. Agustin Chicarro, the project scientist for Mars Express and the organiser of the conference in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, says he expects sparks to fly. "We have allocated one full hour of debate - it could be a lively discussion."

Scientists are understandably cautious. The list of discredited claims for life on Mars is long: from canals built by intelligent beings that early astronomers thought they saw, to "bacteria fossils" found in a Martian meteorite that fell in Antarctica. The fossil-like structures, which were discovered in 1996, are now thought to have been etched by chemical processes.

The debate reignited last year when three teams, including one led by Formisano, independently detected methane on Mars - a gas that bacteria produce on Earth. Some speculated that similar microbes could be producing the methane on Mars. But others argued that methane at the observed concentrations could be explained by non-biological processes producing about 150 tonnes of methane per year. A comet that crashed on Mars long ago or some kind of volcanic activity could supply that amount.