Science:
After spending a full year on Mars, the Curiosity rover has
confirmed its
earlier
finding that the planet's atmosphere contains almost no
methane. The finding is significant because methane is often a
waste product of living organisms. The lack of the chemical in
the atmosphere doesn't disprove the existence of life on Mars,
but it does make it less likely. And the finding challenges
previous detections of possible localized methane pockets that
then quickly disappeared. Those measurements came from orbiters
and remote observers. Curiosity has much better detection
ability and places the upper limit of methane in the atmosphere
at 1.6 parts per billion. That is lower than expected if the
previous localized methane blooms had dispersed through the
atmosphere.
