If you're holding out hope that Mars may have once been an inhabited world, two new studies should put a little spring in your step.
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has identified a variety of organic molecules, the carbon-based building blocks of life as we know it, in 3.5-billion-year-old Red Planet rocks, one of the papers reports.
"These results do not give us any evidence of life," stressed study lead author Jennifer Eigenbrode, a scientist at the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. [The Search for Life on Mars: A Photo Timeline]
"But there is a possibility that [the organics] are from an ancient life source; we just don't know," Eigenbrode told Space.com. "And even if life was never around, they [the molecules] tell us there was at least something around for organisms to eat."
The other new paper also details a Curiosity find: that methane concentrations in Mars' atmosphere cycle seasonally. The discovery suggests that this gas, which here on Earth is produced primarily by living organisms, is seeping out from underground reservoirs, study team members said.
Again, these results are not evidence of life — methane can also be produced by geological processes — but they are consistent with the presence of Martian organisms, which is exciting in and of itself.
"We cannot rule out the possibility that it was created biologically," said study lead author Chris Webster, a senior research fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. "We can't say that it was, but we're certainly not dropping that idea. So, in a sense, that's positive for the astrobiologists in the world."
purely from a science standpoint, this is some very interesting stuff
from a science fiction perspective, we can make new jokes about little green men being heavily flatulent
