Category — Geology

Check out these faaantastic satellite images, brought to you by NASA’s Earth Observing System Project Science Office!  Maybe it’s just me, but the one photo of an urban landscape sticks out like the ugly buck-toothed, big-eared bespectacled kid in your kindergarten class photo.  Remote Sensing FTW!

NASA is reporting that methane (CH4) has been definitively detected on Mars.  Because there are several well-known mechanism that remove methane from the Martian atmosphere, its detection means that there is some active process still creating it.  The only natural methane-producing processes known are geological or *gasp* biological!

So NASA is quite proud to announce that they’ve proved Mars is not a dead planet (in their terminology, alive means either geologically or biologically active, or both).  As they should be; not only does this provide further support for the possibility of life on Mars, it gives clues to what kinds of geological processes might be going on under the Martian surface.  We’ve known for a while now that Mars hasn’t had active plate tectonics (like Earth) for a very long time, which led researchers to suspect that all geological activity had stopped.

Now the challenge is to determine what’s creating the methane.  Call me an optimist, but I’m hoping it’s a bit of both – micro-organisms and geological processes!