NASA Leads The World In Astrobiology. Wow, Who Knew?
Curiosity Detects Unusually High Methane Levels On Mars
“This week, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover found a surprising result: the largest amount of methane ever measured during the mission — about 21 parts per billion units by volume (ppbv). One ppbv means that if you take a volume of air on Mars, one billionth of the volume of air is methane. The finding came from the rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) tunable laser spectrometer. It’s exciting because microbial life is an important source of methane on Earth, but methane can also be created through interactions between rocks and water.”
Keith’s note: This story on detection of Methane on Mars – a possible biosignature – has been featured on thousands of websites. By coincidence NASA is hosting the largest meeting of Astrobiologists on Earth. I’m attending it. You’d think that NASA PAO would want to link – and then promote – the visibility and synergy of these two events. Guess again. No mention at NASA.gov or NASA’s Main Science page.
Look at the official NASA online feature about detection of Methane on Mars – a potentially significant biosignature – the sort of thing NASA Astrobiology program worries about. But does it mention/link to NASA’s Astrobiology Program? Of course not.
Sadly even though there are over 900 scientists from all over the world attending the @NASA-sponsored #AbSciCon2019 https://t.co/0jCz8ByvCv makes no mention of #abscicon on its calendar of events. #astrobiology pic.twitter.com/ToGEugUIMO
— Astrobiology (@astrobiology) June 24, 2019
NASA Can’t Figure Out What Astrobiology Is – Or Who Does It, earlier post
“If you go to the main NASA science page (which makes no mention of “Astrobiology”) and use the search function to search for “astrobiology” you get a search results page that says “no results found” but has some old Astrobiology press releases from 2008.”
I completely ignorant on this subject but it seems to me if there is life it would produce a lot more methane then what was detected. What am I missing here?
It depends on how much life there is, and where it is. Or, if it’s not biologically produced, how much hydrothermal activity there is and where it is. The important thing is that methane shouldn’t be there at all. Between ultraviolet light and chemistry with the major species in the atmosphere, methane should be destroyed fairly quickly. If they measure any methane at all, that means something is producing it. Not necessarily life; there are geological processes which can produce methane. But it’s pretty clear something is going on.
I’m aware of the possibility of the non biological sources. I have no idea how much methane you would expect from possible biological sources.
That’s part of the problem. No one knows how much biological methane production to expect. It could be that life only exists in one, isolated oasis. It could be that such a thing is impossible and, if life exists at all, it would be all over the place. We just don’t know. So estimating the amount of methane life might produce is extremely uncertain.
You are missing what everyone is missing, which is to say, “who knows?”
Astrobiology observations are naturally compared back to the water-based experience we have on Terra. It’s all we have, after all, but in the end possibly not very useful. But again, who knows?
I’ve just finished reading (re-listening, actually) to KSR’s “Aurora,” in which an interstellar starship crew is exposed to all sorts of biological events with no real Earth-analogue. It’s thoughtful and worth reading because Robinson offers unusual oservations and unusual explanations for seemingly simple observtions.
That’s likely to be at play here as well.
Unless, as I hope: aliens.
Is it just Astrobiology or is it anything not HSF related?
It isn’t just astrobiology. That’s Keith’s speciality, so he notices it more. I notice similarly problems with NASA coverage of planetary science, outer solar system missions and planetary magnetospheres in particular. I suspect there are people who study the Earth’s atmosphere who are apoplectic about NASA media relations and outreach on that subject.
In a conversation with a science fiction author about why scientists complain about bad science in fiction, we settled on the fact that people notice things and get annoyed about errors when it’s what they know the most about. As she put it, you should never go to a war movie with a military veteran, a science fiction movie with a scientist, or any movie with those masters of obscure trivia, science fiction fans.
HSF is badly handled, too. More exposure, certainly, but still badly conveyed & communicated.
As I suggested tentatively above, perhaps it has to do with the nature/character/style of the organization itself.
Keith,
You have often criticized NASA PAO, etc, in matters such as this. The lack is certainly there, but I wonder if fixing it (which I too have wished for for many years) is beyond the purview of NASA per se, i.e., a government agency such as NASA certainly is.
Do other government agencies do better handling such interconnected information sharing? What models are out there which NASA (should it decide it ought) could adopt? Government organizations typically have a very difficult time re-inventing themselves, especially if they consider such re-invention beyond the bounds of their responsibilities.
It seems simple from the outside, and it seems warranted from the outside, but does it seem that way from the inside (on both counts)? If not, why not? Where, exactly, does the fix need to be made?
Just wondering in the midst of my shared long-term frustration with a consistently poor engagement of the public.
How about we wait for the peer-reviewed paper first?
Peer review isn’t all that it used to be. Several studies have shown the inability of reviewers to detect significant planted errors. It is not like the reviewers of this are going to be able to duplicate the results in their own labs! I think scrutiny by the wider scientific community is more important than peer review especially when the origin of the methane could be from two diverse sources ( biology or geology).
I’m not sure I’d blame the reviewers for those failures. The editors also play a role. If the reviewers complain about something, and the authors insist it isn’t a problem, it’s the editor who decides to publish the paper. And, in practice, that’s what they do. Publishing a scientific journal is a business, and publishing lots of papers is contributes to the success of that business. It’s also not unknown for a prestigious author or co-author to call up an editor and complain about a reviewer being “unreasonable.”
But in terms of duplicating the results, it is possible to some extent. No one is going to send their own mass spectrometer to Gale crater (at least not any time soon), but people should be able to reproduce the data analysis and interpretation. That’s why NASA instrument teams are required to make their data publicly available and (in theory) document it well enough that someone else in the field can use it. In principle, once the data hits the archives in about six months, someone could independently verify that the signal in question is, in fact, methane at the stated abundance.
What you don’t have a Mars Rover with a mass spectrometer in your garage for just this sort of situation? Well, the reviewers were the problem with the studies I was referring to but you’re right there are other issues with the peer review process. Making the data public is extremely valuable. When you think about it there are probably peer reviewed articles arguing both that Viking did and did not detect life.
Gee, no. No Mars rovers or mass spectrometers in my garage. Actually, I live in an apartment and don’t own a car, so no garage to have one in. I could cobble together a mass spectrometer on my living room table, but it wouldn’t be a very good one. And the high voltage supplies would probably violate my lease and some city zoning regulations.
Seriously, this is an issue with planetary missions. There is a tendency, possibly even a compulsion, to make sure instruments on future missions are much more capable that the ones on previous missions. But when it comes to things like transient methane emissions on Mars, you don’t need more sensitive or capable instruments. You need instruments which are good enough, and so low resource (mass, power, data volume) that you can land a large number of them at a wide variety of locations. But try getting funding to develop an instrument like that.
By the way, you are also correct about the peer reviewed papers on the Viking results. Most of the papers say there was no detection of life. But Levin and colleagues have published papers saying the labeled release experiment did detect life, or that it might have, and that the negative results from the other instruments were incorrect. It is certainly true that the gas chromatograph – mass spectrometer gave dubious results and was incapable of measuring some of the things it was supposed to measure.
Dr. Levin has been arguing SINCE Viking that it detected life.
https://www.space.com/41689…
http://journalofastrobiolog…
He’s definitely in a minority on that one, although it would be possible to do follow-up tests with future landers to prove or disprove that.
Yes, they should have sent follow up missions, perhaps even using the same spacecraft design to reduce cost. But instead they waited 21 years to send another mission to the surface. It’s almost like they are afraid of the implications of discovering life on Mars, although I am not sure why.
I think the two main factors that hampered faster follow-ups to Viking (which was, truly, a spectacular accomplishment; it served to turn Mars into an entire 3-D world with sunrises & sunsets and canyons and mesas, etc, etc) were Viking’s major cost coupled with its ultimately disappointing answer (or so most of the scientists declared it) regarding the presence of life.
It didn’t help that the country & culture had entered their general negative frump regarding technology by then, either.
They didn’t want to repeat a failure, and Viking was regarded by a fair number of people as a failure. They sent spacecraft to Mars to discovery life, and they failed to find life. That’s nonsense, but it was a perception at the time. And it still affects planetary missions. You don’t see missions with a goal of discovering life; just habitability or biosignatures or something similar. The Europa lander study went to great lengths to frame the science goals in a way which allowed a null result to be a success not a failure.
True, in theory, someone would be able to do an independent analysis, but what are the odds it would be published? Since advancement in science is based on publications there is little incentive to repeat an analysis unless there is a high probability of getting it published by proving what was originally published was wrong.
Personally I don’t think the question of life on Mars will be settled until there is a science station in the Mar system, either in orbit or on one of its moons. Of course it might be on the Martian surface, but planetary protection will probably argue against any humans on Mars until the question is settled. That is why I don’t see any near term options for plans to develop Mars. After the Moon the next wave of space settlement and development will be the asteroids, including those in the main asteroid belt.
Grudges are traditional motivation. Someone may very well try to reproduce results simply to prove the original author is wrong. Or that their interpretation is incorrect. And in may cases, that could be very publishable. Authors do tent to cherry pick the data. If there are a dozen examples of a given sort of phenomena, somehow, the figure in the paper is of the one event which best illustrates the author’s interpretation. I even know of one paper with a figure caption calling it a “typical best example”. So there is room for another researcher who reproduces the results, and write a paper saying, “yes, but three other events which you didn’t show prove that something else is going on.”
Also, it’s a common practice to do a little work to reproduce results, either to make sure you know what you’re doing or to convince proposal reviewers that you do. I might want to extend the original work. Sometimes people have so much data that they publish the initial discovery and go off to do something else. That means you can do a more in-depth study with later years of the mission’s data. Or you might want to use the data for a completely different purpose. In either case, you would want to make sure you’re analyzing the data correctly. A good way to make sure is trying to reproduce published results. And sometimes you find out that you can’t, because the original work got it wrong. (Or, because it involved initial results, used preliminary and incorrect calibrations.)
I’ve also gone back and tried to reproduce results because of a third party. The original paper was correct, but understated the uncertainty due to some instrumental issues. A few years later, a theorist tried to draw very sweeping conclusions from something that was really in the noise.
But, yes. The idea that scientific results must be reproducible is in conflict with the professional push to publish new results. It’s also hurt by the modern tendency to limit discussion of methodology in papers, or relegate it to “supplemental material” (in practice, an appendix which is rarely read and for many journals, not even downloaded with the paper itself.)
A search on NASA’s Astrophysics Data System (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.e… for “Mars” and “methane” in abstracts, turns up 320 papers in peer-reviewed journals. This isn’t a new discovery. Curiosity also saw methane in 2014, and Mars Express saw it a few years earlier. This may be the strongest spike they’ve seen, but it’s not the first.
The real news will be the other trace species, if any, they saw. As soon as they saw methane and someone said, “life!”, someone else started listing off all the geological processes which could produce methane. Like almost all biomarkers, it turns out methane isn’t a good, definitive indication of life. (Neither is oxygen or ozone, by the way. Europa’s tenuous atmosphere is made of them. It’s what you get when you bombard ice with hard radiation…) But methane in combination with other things could indicate what produced the methane.
That reminds me what Carl Sagan said about Venus in the Cosmos series. He said early astronomers looking at Venus using primitive telescopes saw nothing but a white disk. They concluded that Venus must be covered with clouds, so it must be raining all the time. If it rains all the time, Venus must have a tropical rainforest on the surface. So astronomers looked at Venus and saw nothing. Their conclusion — it must be teeming with life!
I believe Dr. Sagan was also the person who said the canals on Mars were a product of intelligent life. But that, unfortunately, the intelligent life, in the form of Mr. Lowell, was on the wrong side of the telescope.
Coal releases methane. Did Mars go through a Carboniferous era? One of the most important outcomes of recent scientific inquiry is that the Earth, Luna, and Mars have been sharing material for billions of years. Has life found a way on all three during their existence?
Such an era implies not just life, but also resurfacing and deep burial of organic material. I’d bet against that, and offer at least 5:1 odds. But that’s all estimates, guesses and bets. We can’t actually know without going there and looking.
I agree it is unlikely, given that plate tectonics – absent on Mars – plays a role in the churning of organic material and covering it with material that provides the necessary pressure and heat to form coal. However, just a million years worth of Carboniferous style plant growth followed by at least some burial by rocks and dust might give Mars a layer of something like peat. Interestingly, the epoch that formed our deep bituminous coal caused climate change and a die-off of a large percentage of Earthian life for millions of years. It was a case where too much was, well, too much and vast mats of dead plants clogged the waterways and caused deserts and death.
I honestly don’t know if I agree or disagree. Everything about methane production on the Earth and Mars is so different. Someone can talk about hydrothermal processes, and someone else can say we have limited data on that. (The last event on Earth being the Columbia river formation, about 12 . million years ago)
The truth is out there.
The job title of astrobiologist has about as much credibility as starship captain. It might be a relevant job title in 50 years.
How about the Chief of Planetary Protection? The first person with that title thought it was a bit overblown. But he also liked the Buck Rogers tone it gave to his business cards.
Obviously you have to make trade-offs and sacrifices, but it is kind of a disappointment that Mars 2020 won’t have anything that could expand upon Curiosity’s methane detection. If the methane is coming from a non-biological source, it should be coming up with some other gases as well IIRC.
Yes, that seems to be a weakness in the design of NASA’s Mars missions. I always thought they should have followed up on the Viking results with a variation on the experiment to determine which of the different explanations of the results was the correct one.