Article: A whiff of life on the Red Planet

From: Robert Karl Stonjek (rstonjek_at_bigpond.net.au)
Date: 02/18/05 

Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 01:36:51 -0500 (EST)

A whiff of life on the Red Planet

19:00 16 February 2005
Jenny Hogan

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.

Full Text at NewScientist
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7014

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

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