NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover has made consistent and puzzling findings while roaming the barren surface of the planet’s Gale Crater: mysterious puffs of methane gas that only appear at night and vanish during the day.
Over the years, the rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument has repeatedly detected significant concentrations of the gas, sometimes spiking to 40 times the usual levels — and scientists are still trying to figure out the source, as NASA details in a new blog post.
It’s an especially intriguing finding, given that living creatures produce methane here on Earth, giving the findings special significance as NASA scans the Red Planet for signs of subterranean life.
Leave a reply