Curiosity rover tagged posts

Atmospheric Pressure Changes could be Driving Mars’ Elusive Methane Pulses

2024-01-24
New simulations are helping inform the Curiosity rover’s ongoing sampling campaign. Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Simulations will help Curiosity search for signs of past or present life on the Red Planet. New research shows that atmospheric pressure fluctuations that pull gases up from underground could be responsible for releasing subsurface methane into Mars’ atmosphere; knowing when and where to look for methane can help the Curiosity rover search for signs of life.

“Understanding Mars’ methane variations has been highlighted by NASA’s Curiosity team as the next key step towards figuring out where it comes from,” said John Ortiz, a graduate student at Los Alamos National Laboratory who led the research team.

“There are several challenges associated with meeting that goal, an...

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Mars didn’t Dry Up in one go

View of hillocks on the slopes of Mount Sharp, showing the various types of terrain that will soon be explored by the Curiosity rover, and the ancient environments in which they formed, according to the sedimentary structures observed in ChemCam’s telescope images (mosaics A and B).
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/CNES/CNRS/LANL/IRAP/IAS/LPGN

A research team has discovered that the Martian climate alternated between dry and wetter periods, before drying up completely about 3 billion years ago. The Perseverance rover has just landed on Mars. Meanwhile, its precursor Curiosity continues to explore the base of Mount Sharp (officially Aeolis Mons), a mountain several kilometres high at the centre of the Gale crater...

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NASA’s Curiosity Rover finds clues to chilly Ancient Mars buried in Rocks

This graphic depicts paths by which carbon has been exchanged among Martian interior, surface rocks, polar caps, waters and atmosphere, and it also depicts a mechanism by which it is lost from the atmosphere.
Credits: Lance Hayashida/Caltech

By studying the chemical elements on Mars today — including carbon and oxygen — scientists can work backwards to piece together the history of a planet that once had the conditions necessary to support life.

Weaving this story, element by element, from roughly 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) away is a painstaking process. But scientists aren’t the type to be easily deterred...

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Organic molecules discovered by Curiosity Rover consistent with Early Life on Mars: study

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Organic compounds called thiophenes are found on Earth in coal, crude oil and oddly enough, in white truffles, the mushroom beloved by epicureans and wild pigs.

Thiophenes were also recently discovered on Mars, and Washington State University astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch thinks their presence would be consistent with the presence of early life on Mars.

Schulze-Makuch and Jacob Heinz with the Technische Universität in Berlin explore some of the possible pathways for thiophenes’ origins on the red planet in a new paper published in the journal Astrobiology. Their work suggests that a biological process, most likely involving bacteria rather than a truffle though, may have played a role in the organic compound’s existence in the Martian soil.

“We ...

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