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NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has made consistent and puzzling findings while roaming the barren surface of the planet's Gale Crater: mysterioussignificant 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 aBut while we're still far from being able to tell once and for all if Mars was once — or perhaps still is — teeming with life, NASA researchers are hard at work investigating the...
Pavlov and his colleagues suggested that this layer may have been broken up by the weight of Curiosity driving over it, which could explain why the SAM instrument picked up spiking levels of methane. Even this fascinating finding still can't quite explain the odd seasonality of methane spikes, nor why they only appear at night.
Unfortunately, getting a better picture of how this gas is being released over time is proving difficult. SAM has to limit its methane detection to only a few times a year thanks to the wealth of other jobs Curiosity is tasked with. "Methane experiments are resource intensive, so we have to be very strategic when we decide to do them," SAM principal investigator Charles Malespin told NASA."Some of the methane work will have to be left to future surface spacecraft that are more focused on answering these specific questions," Curiosity project scientist at JPL Ashwin Vasavada added.
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