Curiosity rover detects methane spike, evidence of active organic chemistry

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 (UPI) -- There were likely a lot of "whoever smelt it, dealt it" jokes going around in the control room of NASA's Curiosity mission, as the Mars rover sent back data detailing a spike in methane. But Curiosity was able to exonerate itself by blaming the tenfold spike on a some sort of active organic chemical process.

"This temporary increase in methane -- sharply up and then back down -- tells us there must be some relatively localized source," Sushil Atreya, a member of the Curiosity rover science team and a researcher at the University of Michigan, explained in a recent press release. "There are many possible sources, biological or non-biological, such as interaction of water and rock."

The findings are already reigniting a debate over whether methane-based lifeforms are or were present on the Martian surface. NASA's scientists won't confirm or deny the likelihood that microbes are responsible for the methane spike.

"We can't rule it out," Chris Webster, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told NBC News. "It's equally likely to be geophysical or biogenic. The fact that we've seen it, in a sense, argues that the stock in a possible biogenic source went up."

Scientists say the fact that methane concentrations are so low at other locations -- in the atmosphere and in the soil -- suggests Mars isn't heavily reliant upon meteor impacts as its main source of the organic compound.

The rover also drilled into and extracted dust from a rock known as Cumberland. In doing so, Curiosity was able to detect a range of other organic molecules using its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument. The term organic refers to the presence of carbon, not a confirmed relationship to complex organisms.

"This first confirmation of organic carbon in a rock on Mars holds much promise," Roger Summons, a Curiosity scientist and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained. "Organics are important because they can tell us about the chemical pathways by which they were formed and preserved."

A study detailing Curiosity's methane measurements was published this week in the journal Science, while a paper on the rover's Cumberland findings is pending publication.

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Curiosity rover detects methane spike, evidence of active organic chemistry