Scientists studying the Red Planet have developed a few possible explanations for the presence of methane in Mars' atmosphere. Methane on Mars is being constantly depleted by a chemical reaction triggered by sunlight, meaning that the methane is also replenished at a significant rate. One theory, that methane was being carried into the atmosphere by extramartian bodies such as meteorites, has been taken off the table thanks to a new study by researchers at Imperial College London. The study found that the volume of methane released by meteorites upon entering the atmosphere is far too low to supply Mars' current methane levels. Other studies have ruled out another possibility, that volcanic activity has been producing the methane.

This leaves two frontrunner solutions to Mars' methane mystery. One possibility is that the methane is produced as a byproduct of a chemical reaction between volcanic rock and water. The other is that microorganisms are living on the planet's surface and that their metabolic process produces methane.

It's far, far away from indicating life on Mars, but it does narrow down the hunt for the methane's source. A joint NASA/ESA mission is scheduled to head to Mars in 2018 to look for the source of the methane.

Life on Mars theory boosted by new methane study [PhysOrg]

As someone, possibly Jake from Animorphs, once observed, Earth is a tough neighborhood. A feature at Smithsonian magazine illustrates this memorably, noting the regions and circumstances where it doesn't make sense for life to exist, yet where it somehow turns up.

There are a few great counterintuitive examples, like the pupfish colonies soldiering on in Death Valley's aquifers and springs, or the Desulforudis audaxviator bacteria that lives in complete biological isolation at the bottom of a gold mine in South Africa. (D. audaxviator is named after a passage in — what else? — Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, from the Latin for "bold traveler.")

Other places where life springs eternal: on the surface of pools of acidic mining runoff; drifting in the stratosphere at altitudes of more than eleven miles; and in facilities at the Carnegie Institution, where scientists accidentally exposed strains of E. coli to pressures of 16,000 atmospheres, theoretically more than life can withstand, only to find that a number of the samples had survived.

Then there are the Jurassic bacteria, preserved in spore form in Antarctic ice for millions of years and resuscitated in modern labs — not unlike Philip J. Fry, except less likely to leave a hat full of milk in a storage locker.

If nothing else, this extremophiles' hall of fame lends some hope to those awaiting reports of extraplanetary biota. There's water on the moon, possible Martian microbe fossils in a crashed meteorite, and the potential for oceans of Jovian fish on oxygen-lousy Europa. If a previously unknown phylum of bacteria can be discovered in Yellowstone's near-boiling hot springs, why couldn't there be something waiting out there in the star-system suburbs?

Top ten places where life shouldn't exist… but does [Smithsonian]

Spaceflight Now is reporting that, within the next few days, NASA plans to publicly discuss new research concerning ALH 84001, the Martian meteorite found in Allan Hills, Antarctica. The research is said to strengthen the findings of the team that studied the meteorite over a decade ago and announced in 1996 that the meteorite might contain evidence of bacterial life.

The new research, detailed in a 46-page peer reviewed paper, looks at magnetic bacteria found on Earth. The researchers have closely studied magnetic bacteria and the formations they create in rocks. The bacteria leave distinctive remnants in the rock, uniquely-shaped magnetite crystals that test with a chemical purity that reflects biological, rather than geological, origins. That these remnants are unique to magnetic bacteria on Earth and are also found in the Allan Hills meteorite strongly suggests that the crystals indicate ancient bacterial life on Mars.

Critics of the original NASA report have doubted these features as reliable fossils, claiming that the shape and chemical purity could be achieved by the same thermal shock that separated the material from Mars in the first place. But new research reported in the paper disproves the thermal shock theory.

Spaceflight says that the new research isn't quite a "smoking gun," but it greatly strengthens the case for life on Mars, and could change the conversation about future NASA missions.

Martian meteorite surrenders new secrets of possible life [Spaceflight via Universe Today]

At a recent meeting of the Geological Society of America, researchers announced that the colorful deposits, found in lava caves all over the world, are in fact biological in origin. Previously undetected microbes excrete waste inside the caves and the buildup of what one geomicrobiologist terms "bug poop" creates these impressive displays.

This discovery — that something long thought to be mineral turned out to be biological — has implications for researchers looking for life on Mars. Based on photos of the surface, it appears that Mars holds, or at one time held, lava caves similar to those where the microbe waste was found, and similar microbes might have thrived inside those caves. Mars researchers may want to consider taking samples of apparent mineral deposits to determine if those deposits are, in fact, "bug poop."

Lava Cave Minerals Actually Microbe Poop [National Geographic via Neatorama]

On August 22, 1924, the Earth was 55,777,566 km from the Red Planet during the Mars opposition, offering ideal conditions for receiving radio signals from Mars — if anyone happened to be sending them. Amherst College professor David Todd persuaded both the US Army and Navy to listen for messages from Mars. In the telegram above, Edward W. Eberle, the Chief of US Naval Operations, informs Naval stations of the possibility of Martian communications, and instructs them to report any unusual phenomena. For three days, the stations listened for unusual transmissions, but came up empty handed.

[Letters of Note]

The Mars-500 pseudomission will take place next year at the Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow. The 520 days is meant to copy the length of an actual Mars mission, including the journey to and from the planet and a 30-day stay on the surface. The ESA is currently seeking six volunteers (English and Russian speakers ages 20-50 in good health with specific science backgrounds) to simulate the less fun parts of being an astronaut. Before you send in your application, New Scientist points out some possible downsides:

Boredom: The major complaint from participants in this year's 105-day mission of isolation was severe boredom. Maybe the ESA could let you take a Kindle on board, or you and your fellow fake astronauts could play a long-running RPG. But be prepared to go pretty stir-crazy.

Hating Your Podmates: In 1982 two Soyuz cosmonauts, Valentin Vitalyevich Lebedev and Anatoli Berezovoi, hated each other so much that they spent their 211-day mission in almost complete silence. 520 days is more than enough time to start hating the way someone else mouth breathes or chews their food.

Sexual Harassment: During a simulated space station mission in 2000, a Russian man tried to forcibly kiss one of the women on board. Eventually, the Russian "cosmonauts" had to be separated from the rest of the crew.

Not Actually Accomplishing Anything: Peter Suedfeld of the University of British Columbia wrote a study that suggests these faux missions aren't ideal for simulating actual mission conditions. He suggests that it would be better to study exploratory missions on Earth, such as research expeditions in Antarctica.

What's the point of a fake 500-day Mars mission? [New Scientist]

According to The Register, this is the tallest rocket NASA has built in three decades, and it has 700 sensors on board to understand how a rocket this tall can fly. Photos by AP/John Raoux.

According to experiments carried out by Jonathan Merrison of Aarhus University in Denmark, the color may be the result of magnetite and quartz particles colliding as the result of being blown about the planet's surface, with each collision exposing surfaces of the quartz that oxidize the magnetite. After tests artificially creating similar circumstances, Merrison and his team now suggest that "a few thousand years" worth of such collisions would've resulted in Mars becoming the color it is today.

Wind, not water, may explain Red Planet's hue [New Scientist]

The rock, dubbed "Block Island," is approximately 2 feet long and has a blue tint. The rover took a picture of the formation in passing two weeks back, but the Rover team decided that Opportunity should backtrack and do some more tests on the relatively giant space rock.

The tests revealed that the meteorite is made up of iron and nickle, which makes it very similar to the kinds of rocks that have been found on the surface of the Earth. The big discovery isn't the composition of the meteorite, though. It's the size.

NASA says that any rock of this size would certainly break apart if it were to fall on the surface of Mars today. For such a large meteorite to remain intact, the red planet's atmosphere would have to have been much thicker. The NASA team chalks the existence of Mars's thicker atmosphere up to one of two causes: either Mars has vast stores of carbon dioxide ice that filled the atmosphere in a relatively recent warm period, or the meteorite fell billions of years ago.

Whatever the case, the rock also provides scientists with a way to see how Mars's weather and climate have affected a foreign object, letting them piece together a sort of reverse long-term weather forecast for the planet's surface. And if we ever get that manned flight to Mars we are all hoping for, "Block Island" could become one of Mars's popular roadside attractions, like a Martian Chimney Rock.

Meteorite Found on Mars Yields Clues About Planet's Past [via PhysOrg]

Using the traditional fuel-burning rockets that carried humans on lunar missions, it would take a manned spacecraft six months to travel from the Earth to Mars. While you could find volunteers in spades willing to trade a year in a tin can for a glimpse of another planet, osteoporosis-inducing weightlessness and dangerous radiation render a lengthy trip unfeasible. But attention has turned to ion engines. While a combustion rocket thrusts a space shuttle through the atmosphere, then lets it coast to its destination, ion engines are able to effect a more continuous thrust:

Ion engines, on the other hand, accelerate electrically charged atoms, or ions, through an electric field, thereby pushing the spacecraft in the opposite direction. They provide much less thrust at a given moment than do chemical rockets, which means they can't break free of the Earth's gravity on their own.

But once in space, they can give a continuous push for years, like a steady breeze at the back of a sailboat, accelerating gradually until they're moving faster than chemical rockets.

Engineers at the Ad Astra are seeing promise in VASIMR, an ion engine that uses a radio frequency generator to heat charged particles and create greater thrust than other similar engines. Ad Astra plans to attach a solar-powered VASIMR engine to the International Space Station for tests, and, if they are successful, could use VASIMR periodically to thrust the ISS back into the Earth's orbit.

But, if the engine were powered by an onboard nuclear reactor, its applications could be much more profound. Using 1000 times the energy of a solar-powered VASIMR, a nuclear-powered VASIMR engine could propel a manned spacecraft to Mars in a mere 39 days. Although the technology to play a nuclear reactor on a space shuttle is still a ways off, many in astrophysics feel the project holds enormous promise. NASA has provided Ad Astra with a small stipend for VASIMR development, and NASA chief Charles Bolden had high praise for the possibility of shortened space travel:

If engines, such as VASIMR, could be developed to take people to the Red Planet in 40 days, "that puts it inside the range of what we feel comfortable of doing with humans," he told New Scientist. "Something like VASIMR – that's a game changer."

Ion engine could one day power 39-day trips to Mars [New Scientist via Futurismic]

The microbe Methanosarcina barkeri is known to grow on Earth in places where oxygen and nutrients are scarce and conditions are harsh — much like they are on Mars. University of Maryland scientist Kevin Sowers thinks that M. barkeri could survive the various climate extremes of Mars because it already often does so on Earth. According toAstrobiology Magazine:

"We are pushing the envelope to see what the organism's limits are," Sowers says. They will use DNA microarrays and 3D tomography to see how the cells respond and what benefit the outer shell confers.

Sowers and his colleagues are interested in M. barkeri because it excretes methane as part of its respiratory process, which some believe might be the source of the methane in the Martian atmosphere. Sowers and colleagues are investigating how the microbe reacts to the specific extremes of Mars, including huge temperature and humidity swings and scarce nutrients.

M. barkeri might well be up to the challenge of surviving unassisted on Mars: in addition to exhaling methane, it can digest methanol and acetate and, lacking that, can create its own organic molecules from other molecular elements it finds in its environment. Unlike spore-forming microbes, when conditions get too harsh to support even microbial life, M. barkeri forms a tough outer layer not unlike connective tissue in higher vertebrates.

Once tested on Earth, it's even possible that M. barkeri could be part of a future expedition to the Red Planet along with some human passengers in need of more technological assistance.

Tough Microbe Has The Right Stuff for Mars [Astrobiology Magazine]

[Image via the Microbe Wiki]

The discussion took place during the National Aviation Hall of Fame Spirit of Flight Award. Neil Armstrong talked generally about the benefits of setting large future goals, but Buzz Aldrin specifically said that humans should aim next to land on Mars.

It's interesting that NASA hasn't had a clearly defined goal like the Moon landing since that goal came to fruition. The Moon landing forced NASA to quickly develop highly experimental technologies. A similar push to Mars, at least according to Neil Armstrong, would spur additional new technologies and jump-start the future.

So no matter what NASA actually intends to do, it's clear that the men who actually journeyed to the Moon are tired of all this Moon talk. They are taking their official Mars pitch to the president today.

Apollo 11 astronauts look beyond moon, toward Mars [via Physorg]

The experiment was designed to see if the crew could conduct experiments and deal with stressful situations they might experience, including emergencies and communication delays. No murderous computers were involved. The American scientists running the experiment forced their counterparts to endure sleep deprivation, monitored their interactions with Mission Control, and then looked at how stress and fatigue impacted the performance of their duties.

The scientists running the experiment consider it a great opportunity. Said project leader Charles A. Czeislder, who worked on the project,

We've done experiments in the sleep lab to test the efficacy of lighting interventions, but that is a highly controlled environment. By transitioning studies into an operational environment, like the 105-Day Mission, we have the opportunity to learn how to best deploy interventions in a realistic mission setting. This analog is a great intermediate step before implementation on an actual spaceflight.

He and colleagues are hoping that the experiment will allow them not only to help astronauts survive long flights in cramped quarters, but provide some data to help other sleep-derived Earthbound professionals with stressful jobs to stay awake and function better.

In the sleep deprivation experiment, scientists expect to prove that bathing sleep-deprived workers in green light rather than red suppresses the body's production of melatonin, allowing them to work more effectively during overnight shifts. In the stress impact experiment, scientists used facial recognition-style software during videotaped cognitive tests, to have the computer look for signs of stress or negative emotions, in an effort to validate the software for use during real missions. Meanwhile, they went through tests that measured their attentiveness, response times and impulsiveness. In the final experiment, the crew experimented with differing levels of autonomy with mission control to track whether lots of interaction with management was more or less helpful to individual relationships and job performance. Initial results suggest that they didn't appreciated being nagged any more than the rest of us.

105-Day Mars Simulation: U.S. Studies Focus On Improving Work Performance [National Space Biomedical Research Institute ]

This research is based on images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The images show that water carved a 30 mile long canyon and then collected in a delta valley to form a lake. This lake and delta are prime candidate spots for finding buried ancient life.

In this image, the research team has reconstructed what the lake, dubbed Shalbatana Lake, could have looked like in its prime. The lake itself was 450 meters deep (1,476 feet) and contained as much water as Lake Champlain in Vermont.

Just as on Earth, lakes and deltas could provide a habitat for various types of life. The next step is to start digging.

Mars Lake Held as Much Water as Lake Champlain [Discovery News]

(Image: G. Di Achille, University of Colorado)

According to New Scientist, there's a possibility that we may have been... cooking... the evidence of Martian life all along:

[L]ast year, NASA's Phoenix lander... stumbled on something in the Martian soil that may have, in effect, been hiding the organics: a class of chemicals called perchlorates.

At low temperatures, perchlorates are relatively harmless. But when heated to hundreds of degrees Celsius they release a lot of oxygen, which tends to cause any nearby combustible material to burn. For that very reason, perchlorates are used in rocket propulsion.

The Phoenix and Viking landers looked for organic molecules by heating soil samples to similarly high temperatures to evaporate them and analyse them in gas form. When Douglas Ming of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and colleagues tried heating organics and perchlorates like this on Earth, the resulting combustion left no trace of organics behind.

On the plus side, this discovery means that there may, indeed, be proof of life on Mars... it just makes us look rather embarrassed for having wasted years of possible exploration by accidentally looking in the wrong way for it.

Mars robots may have destroyed evidence of life [New Scientist]

Images from The War of The Worlds Book Cover Collection.

Michael Chabon, author of such books as The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, has signed on to rewrite the script for Disney's big-screen adaption of A Princess of Mars, the first of eleven books in the John Carter saga. Chabon's previous screenwriting experience is writing a draft of Spider-Man 2, although only about a third of his material made it to the finished film.

Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily on the LA Weekly website first mentioned this news last Wednesday in passing in a post about Chabon switching agents; the post listed John Carter of Mars as one of his screenwriting credits.

Intrigued, Chabon fansite The Amazing Website of Kavalier & Clay contacted the man directly. Chabon confirmed the story:

"I've been hired to do some revisions to an already strong script by Andrew Stanton and Mark Andrews," Chabon said. "I wrote my original screenplay The Martian Agent back in 1995 because I wished I could do [Edgar Rice] Burroughs's Barsoom. So this is pretty much a dream come true for me."

Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs first began exploring his vision of Mars, which he called Barsoom after the native Martians' name for the planet, in the 1912 serial Under the Moons of Mars, which was later collected and published in 1917 as Princess of Mars. The books follow John Carter, a Civil War veteran who is inexplicably transported to Mars and plunged into civil war between the dying planet's many inhabitants.

Thanks to his bravery in battle and extensive military skills, Carter quickly earns the respect of the warlike Green Martians, but their capture and imprisonment of the Red Martian Princess Dejah Thoris soon tests his newfound allegiances. Building off of nineteenth century astronomer Percival Lowell's long since debunked notions of Mars, including the planet's infamous supposed canal system, Burroughs spun a pulpy tale of epic adventure and romance that influenced the likes of Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Carl Sagan.

Disney gained the rights to the John Carter books in 2007, after Paramount gave up on the project. Previous adaptation attempts had included directors such as Robert Rodriguez and Jon Favreau. Current director Andrew Stanton is best known for his work with Pixar, where he directed Finding Nemo and Wall-E. Stanton and Mark Andrews completed a first draft in 2008; it is unclear whether Chabon will be simply revising or completely rewriting the script. The movie is currently set for a 2012 release date to mark the centenary of the original serial.

[The Amazing Website Of Kavalier & Clay]

To enhance the realism of the test, the test subjects - including Russian cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Sergei Ryazansky, along with two Europeans and two other Russians - will have all the food and supplies they need packed in with them. They can bring personal effects like books, DVDs, and laptops, but all communications with the outside world will be time-delayed by 20 minutes, just as they would be if their ship were in Martian orbit.

Each "astronaut" will have a tiny personal space to sleep in, and the ship comes equipped with three rooms. One is for medical isolation, one for food supplies, and one for "living," including the six personal spaces and an exercise area. The entire "ship" is 19,500 cubic feet.

The crew will often wear biosensors so that researchers can monitor their brain activity. If this test is successful, NASA will start a test at the end of the year to isolate 6 people for 520 days.

Despite the fact that men and women have been living together on the ISS for years, no women are being tested. Huh? Apparently international space agencies are expecting sexist policies to continue for at least two decades into the future, when a crewed Martian flight is planned.

via Yahoo! News