Curiosity's ability to find life on Mars is decreasing

NASA's Mars self-discovery ship Curiosity did not find methane on Mars after more than a year of research and performed atmospheric red planetary experiments using Sample Analysis at Mars sample analyzer. (SAM). Methane is an important sign to recognize the existence of biological activities, and the "absence" of methane will put a big question mark on the current view of life on Mars.

As the simplest structure of hydrocarbons, methane is abundant on planets in the solar system, creating a large layer in the atmosphere of giant gas planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. On Earth, natural gas is mostly methane and it also increases rapidly in quantity due to the activity of bacteria and other organisms. It appears under the most basic biological level and its presence is viewed by scientists as a sign of the existence of life, although it may originate from other sources.

What surprised and discouraged the search efforts of the Curiosity was not that it found very little methane gas on Mars, but that it actually found nothing to the minimum it could detect. Yes, that NASA says it can detect well below 1.3 parts per billion (ppb). Earlier reports indicate that the methane density of Mars is about 45 parts per billion, but that is the result of observations from ground telescopes and orbiting spacecraft.

The advantage of the Curiosity is that it has the Tunable Laser Spectrometer system , which is part of SAM, the largest of the 10 test equipment packages that this self-propelled ship carries. . The spectrophotometer will capture and condense Mars's air inside its "lab" , before projecting an infrared laser back and forth through the model using a type of projection mirrors. This method allows to measure the amount of light absorbed by gas molecules and to know their number. In the six times between October last year and June this year, the Curiosity vessel checked the presence of methane on Mars, but found nothing.

The truth about Curiosity's research results is a "powerful blow" to the hope of finding life on Mars, which also indicates that other sources of methane on the planet are almost non-existent. . Based on the results, it can be calculated that Mars only produces less than 20 tons of methane gas per year on the entire planet. This figure is equivalent to the amount of methane produced by a 200-cow herd on Earth.

However, the absence of methane does not mean the hope of finding life on Mars has ended. From this result, scientists will change the direction of research and look for other causes, because there are still many other bases to recognize life and some types of microbial activity do not produce methane gas.