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Possible Life on Mars

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Uld there be life on Mars? NASA probe could confirm methane clouds...meaning the conditions for life DO exist. By Daily Mail Reporter Updated: 11:29 GMT, 19 February 2012 Scientists are set to prove for the first time that methane clouds form over the surface of Mars in summer months - meaning the conditions for life unquestionably exist. A new NASA probe due to land on the planet’s surface in August is set to confirm the findings. The Mars Science Laboratory Rover, also known as Curiosity, will be able to detect microscopic amounts of methane.

Life on Mars? Methane clouds form over the surface of Mars in summer months. This image is a map of methane concentrations in Autumn over on a real true colour map of Mars It will be the first time scientists at NASA will have been able to prove the existence of methane clouds, the existence of which have only previously been deduced from astronomical observations. ‘The reports are extraordinary,’ says Kevin Zahnle of NASA Ames Research Center of the possibility of finally finding methane clouds. Zahnle said we can’t disregard what we know about methane. LIFE ON MARS?, PHOBOS EXCLUSIVE, Alien bases? Is This Proof of Life on Mars? Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter View of Mars from Viking 2 lander, September 1976. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) The Curiosity rover is currently on its way to Mars, scheduled to make a dramatic landing within Gale Crater in mid-August and begin its hunt for the geologic signatures of a watery, life-friendly past.

Solid evidence that large volumes of water existed on Mars at some point would be a major step forward in the search for life on the Red Planet. But… has it already been found? Researchers from universities in Los Angeles, California, Tempe, Arizona and Siena, Italy have published a paper in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences (IJASS) citing the results of their work with data obtained by NASA’s Viking mission. The twin Viking 1 and 2 landers launched in August and September of 1975 and successfully landed on Mars in July and September of the following year. The results, although promising, were inconclusive. ‘Worms from hell’ unearth possibilities for extraterrestrial life. The two lead researchers, Gaetan Borgonie of the University of Ghent in Belgium and Tullis Onstott of Princeton University, said the discovery of creatures so far below ground, with nervous, digestive and reproductive systems, was akin to finding “Moby Dick in Lake Ontario.”

“This is telling us something brand new,” said Onstott, whose pioneering work in South Africa over the past decade has revolutionized the understanding of microbial life known generally as extremophiles, which live in places long believed to be uninhabitable. “For a relatively complex creature like a nematode to penetrate that deep is simply remarkable,” he said. An article introducing the subterranean nematodes, one of which was formally named Halicephalobus mephisto after the “Lord of the Underworld,” appears in Wednesday’s edition of the journal Nature. H. mephisto was found in water flowing from a borehole about one mile below the surface in the Beatrix gold mine. Life's Building Blocks May Have Been Found on Mars. NASA's Viking landers carried four instruments designed to search for signs of Martian life: a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, as well as experiments for gas exchange, labeled release and pyrolytic release.

It may have been successful.NASA NASA's Viking landers may have detected the ingredients for life on Mars after all, according to a new study. Back in the 1970s, the two Viking probes scooped up and heated Martian dirt, then looked for organic molecules — the carbon-based building blocks of life as we know it — in the samples. The landers found little, aside from two strange chlorine compounds that researchers at the time attributed to contamination from cleaning fluids. But the new study suggests that the soil did indeed contain organics, which can have biological or nonbiological origins.

They were just destroyed before Viking could detect them. Accounting for perchlorate So the scientists performed a lab experiment. Not proof of life Following up with the next Mars rover. Debunk This - Undeniable Proof - Mars Has Life On It.- Leaked NASA Archives Part 1.