http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6981361/

Signs of current life on Mars, researchers claim
Methane signatures seen hinting at possibilities underground
By Brian Berger
Space News Staff Writer
Space.com
Updated: 2:47 p.m. ET Feb. 16, 2005

WASHINGTON - A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials
at a private meeting here that they have found strong evidence that
life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by
pockets of water.

The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA's Ames Research
Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted
their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their
paper currently is being peer reviewed.

What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of
the private meeting, which took place Sunday, is not direct proof of
life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible
biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in
caves here on Earth.

Stoker and other researchers have long theorized that the Martian
subsurface could harbor biological organisms that have developed
unusual strategies for existing in extreme environments. That
suspicion led Stoker and a team of U.S. and Spanish researchers in
2003 to southwestern Spain to search for subsurface life near the Rio
Tinto river-so-called because of its reddish tint-the product of iron
being dissolved in its highly acidic water.

Stoker did not respond to messages left Tuesday on her voice mail at
Ames.

Stoker told SPACE.com in 2003, weeks before leading the expedition to
southwestern Spain, that by studying the very acidic Rio Tinto, she
and other scientists hoped to characterize the potential for a
"chemical bioreactor" in the subsurface - an underground microbial
ecosystem of sorts that might well control the chemistry of the
surface environment.

Making such a discovery at Rio Tinto, Stoker said in 2003, would mean
uncovering a new, previously uncharacterized metabolic strategy for
living in the subsurface. "For that reason, the search for life in the
Rio Tinto is a good analog for searching for life on Mars," she said.

Stoker told her private audience Sunday evening that by comparing
discoveries made at Rio Tinto with data collected by ground-based
telescopes and orbiting spacecraft, including the European Space
Agency's Mars Express, she and Lemke have made a very a strong case
that life exists below Mars' surface.

The two scientists, according to sources at the Sunday meeting, based
their case in part on Mars' fluctuating methane signatures that could
be a sign of an active underground biosphere and nearby surface
concentrations of the sulfate jarosite, a mineral salt found on Earth
in hot springs and other acidic bodies of water like Rio Tinto that
have been found to harbor life despite their inhospitable
environments.

One of NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers, Opportunity, bolstered the case
for water on Mars when it discovered jarosite and other mineral salts
on a rocky outcropping in Merdiani Planum, the intrepid rover's
landing site chosen because scientists believe the area was once
covered by salty sea.

Stoker and Lemke's research could lead the search for Martian biology
underground, where standing water would help account the curious
methane signatures the two have been analyzing.

"They are desperate to find out what could be producing the methane,"
one attendee told Space News. "Their answer is drill, drill, drill."

NASA has no firm plans for sending a drill-equipped lander to Mars,
but the agency is planning to launch a powerful new rover in 2009 that
could help shed additional light on Stoker and Lemke's intriguing
findings. Dubbed the Mars Science Laboratory, the nuclear-powered
rover will range farther than any of its predecessors and will be
carrying an advanced mass spectrometer to sniff out methane with
greater sensitivity than any instrument flown to date.

In 1996 a team of NASA and Stanford University researchers created a
stir when they published findings that meteorites recovered from the
Allen Hills region of Antarctica contained evidence of possible past
life on Mars. Those findings remain controversial, with many
researchers unconvinced that those meteorites held even possible
evidence that very primitive microbial life had once existed on Mars.

© 2005 Space.com.


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Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.

Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.

America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP