ammonia in mars atmosphere - mars express found it

chaosman · 2004-07-15 12:44:45

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3896335.stm

quote:

"There are no known ways for ammonia to be present in the Martian atmosphere that do not involve life," a US Space Agency (Nasa) scientist told BBC News Online.

C M Edwards · 2004-07-15 13:58:09

Well, well, the little space probe that could!

If the halflife of gaseous ammonia in the Martian atmosphere is really as short as this article implies, it should be relatively easy to find out where it's coming from. (Surely a single cloud of it can't circumnavigate Mars in a few hours.)

Volcanoes aren't everywhere. If the ammonia is everywhere, then there are only two possible explanations for it:

1) the halflife is dramatically longer than predicted.

2) life.

Grypd · 2004-07-15 14:59:48

Bit of a poke in the eye for Nasa 2 x Billion dollar space probes and they are designed as geologists. They can not detect ammonia or what causes it.
This would not be the case if a man Had found the ammonia

Shaun Barrett · 2004-07-15 19:21:24

Now ammonia.
The evidence to back the logic is mounting. Simple deductive reasoning has indicated for some time now that Mars harbours life.
If you stand very still and keep perfectly quiet, you can feel the paradigm shifting!

I still find it remarkable that America closed the book on 'life on Mars' after some positive indications from Viking, and hasn't sent a single life-detection device to Mars in the quarter-century since. I guess there are good reasons for this bizarre behaviour but they're not immediately obvious to me and they're great fuel for conpiracy-theorists' speculations!
???

Shaun Barrett · 2004-07-15 19:24:37

Now ammonia.
The evidence to back the logic is mounting. Simple deductive reasoning has indicated for some time now that Mars harbours life.
If you stand very still and keep perfectly quiet, you can feel the paradigm shifting!

I still find it remarkable that America closed the book on 'life on Mars' after some positive indications from Viking, and hasn't sent a single life-detection device to Mars in the quarter-century since. I guess there are good reasons for this bizarre behaviour but they're not immediately obvious to me and they're great fuel for conpiracy-theorists' speculations!
???

Palomar · 2004-07-16 05:10:09

"There are no known ways for ammonia to be present in the Martian atmosphere that do not involve life," a US Space Agency (Nasa) scientist told BBC News Online.

*Well, I'm not the scientist. For some reason I feel skeptical, but it has -nothing- to do with a desire to find life on Mars or otherwise; I guess I've been bitten too many times by the "too good to be true" bug. :-\

How much ammonia must be present to indicate life? Is this a trace amount tweaking hopes and expectations or an overabundant amount which points towards inconculsive proof?

I can't get the link to that article to open for me, so will try to find it elsewhere during my 'net browsing today.

--Cindy

::EDIT:: Got the link to the article to open up finally. Okay, they're being cautious: *Could* mean life on Mars...ammonia a tenative finding..."Ammonia is not a stable molecule in the Martian atmosphere. If it was not replenished in some way, it would only last a few hours before it vanished."

Shaun Barrett · 2004-07-16 05:31:50

Cindy, I understand your slightly cynical, or should I say strictly scientific, attitude to this latest discovery. There have indeed been many false hopes in planetary science over the years.

Your attention to the details of the revelation does you credit because the findings certainly are described as "tentative" and we should be wary of any scientific data that haven't been confirmed.
I suspect that the data must be fairly reliable or they wouldn't be publishing them soon. But science leaves no room for interpretation when it comes to the burden of proof and no single set of data, however compelling, can be allowed to stand unless it can be verified by independent researchers.

There can be no doubt I've popped the champagne cork a little too early in this matter and that your reservations are quite correct.
With any luck, we won't have to wait too long for confirmation, one way or the other.

Shaun Barrett · 2004-07-16 05:37:08

P.S. Sorry about the double post above. My server was having a mild attack of apoplexy and I wasn't sure the original submission had gone through
For some reason, I couldn't seem to find the 'Delete' button ... still can't!

atomoid · 2004-07-17 03:40:27

quote:
There]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3896335.stm]"There are no known ways for ammonia to be present in the Martian atmosphere that do not involve life," a US Space Agency (Nasa) scientist told BBC News Online.

I guess that means Uranus' ammonia came from some other source? Why the short half-life? Mars too hot? other gasses react with it?

OR, maybe the ammonia is just bound up in volcanic rocks and is being slowly released through erosional processes?
any geologists out there know if this is likely?

But, "no active hotspots"? really? didn't Oddyssey find http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/spac … 7.htm]some active hotspots in Hellas Basin?:

infrared images taken by the Odyssey showed the hotspots in the Hellas Basin - laid out in a chain - were hotter than the surrounding environment both during the day and at night.
Once the Odyssey's companion satellite, the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, takes high-resolution images of the formations in clear light, it will be possible to identify them definitively as ice towers or something else.

Funny, about a year later, I haven't heard any follow up or anything more about these hotspots. Was that MGS picture ever taken??

lunarmark · 2004-07-19 09:08:42

WOOOh wait a minute,

There are plenty of other reasons for Ammonia that don't require life. Volcanic activity can emmit it in bucket loads, lets not forget methane is present too another Volcanic side effect (and indeed another possible indicator of life). But the fact is they have already detected the possible rudiments of Volcanic/thermic activity.

They have not found life, at the moment just a nitrogeon compound, save the champagne. Exactly how much Ammonia, have they found? clearly it's a very small amount, so why would you have small localised Ammonia concentration in one place, and not everywhere else (if there was life would you not expect it to be 'global'.

To me it appears to just be a local Volcanic/thermal outgass breaking down into Ammonia, just as is seen on other planets including our own.

More about Ammonia...>>

Ammonia (NH3) is a colourless pungent gas that is familiar to us as the smell of urine. In fact probably no other compound can be identified by its smell and correctly named by as many people as ammonia. It can be detected in the air at a level of only about 50-60 ppm, and at levels of 100-200 ppm it sharply irritates the eyes and lungs. At even higher concentrations it makes the lungs fill with fluid and can quickly cause death. Ammonia takes it name from the worshippers of the Egyptian god Amun - the Ammonians, because they used ammonium chloride (NH4Cl) in their rites. Ammonium chloride (also known as sal volatile) occurs naturally in cracks near volcanoes, and when it is warmed it decomposes into the pungent ammonia. ???

lunarmark · 2004-07-19 09:12:35

"So far the PFS has observed a depletion of carbon dioxide and an enrichment of water vapour over some of the large extinct volcanoes on Mars"

More evidence of Volcanic's...

Shaun Barrett · 2004-07-19 19:32:54

All good points.
However, I still think there's a biosphere on Mars, though I won't be upset if I'm wrong.
My ideal situation is for Mars to be sterile and volcanically active. These two situations are ideal from a terraforming point of view and colonisation/terraforming are my main aims for Mars.

Rxke · 2004-07-21 08:09:24

Hmmm... No ammonia on Mars found, yet.

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/sto … ront/]Hoax? Or very sloppy reporting...

"”It is not true; it is a hoax,” he told me Friday.
”The instrument aboard the Mars Express has not looked for ammonia; ammonia has not been found, and the principal investigator for the instrument will not talk about it at a conference to be held in Paris next week.”
Mr. De Marchi also went on to castigate the article's use of an unnamed NASA scientist. ”This makes it of course impossible to trace how the information did surface,” adding slyly that the wrongness of the report means ”it must be very hot in England this week.”
He concluding by saying that this was not the first time Mr. Whitehouse had written an article based on speculation which later proved to be wrong.
Specifically he pointed out the British journalist also reported erroneously that oceans of liquid methane or ethane had been found on Saturn's moon Titan."

C M Edwards · 2004-07-21 15:11:34

Argh! Hoaxed Again! :bars2:

I feel like Charlie Brown after Lucy pulls away the football...

lunarmark · 2004-07-22 05:58:03

Fair enough, now there is even less evidence for life !

lunarmark · 2004-07-22 06:10:28

I happen to have met Dr David Whitehouse, on a number of occasions, he is always very thourough with his facts, He is also a very intellegent bloke, so I am supprised he would have come to any false conclusions unless he was given that information (maybe with a nod and a wink) from someone in the know at the ESA... And he is one of the few people in the Media who actually has a relevent qualification (PHD).

More likley the pressure has been put on from those on top at the ESA etc, to go 'un-public' until the evidence is better i.e lets avoid another 'Mars Meteorite fiasco lads'...

Interesting article by the Globe and Mail though, sure wouldn't like to be his attorney

RobertDyck · 2004-07-22 07:44:10

Here's another question: where did all the nitrogen go? There is strong evidence from MGS, Odyssey, and Spirit/Opportunity of substantial liquid water on Mars in the past. It appears that the "dry ocean basin" in the north really was a salty ocean. That would have required substantially more atmosphere than today. The proportion of CO2 in Mars atmosphere today is roughly the same as Venus and what science believes Earth was in its primordial past. But CO2 is litterally frozen as dry ice at whichever pole is experiencing winter. Water ice is frozen as permafrost, Odyssey found it. So where did all the nitrogen go? When I asked that question at the 4th Canadian Space Exploration Workshop, the atmospheric scientists dismissed it as "escaped into space". Does the 2.7% N2 of today really represent the residual after the rest escaped? If that was the mechanism I would expect more. If it didn't escape into space, where did it go? Are there nitride beds burried somewhere? According to my encyclopaedia "Alkali-metal nitrides such as sodium nitride, Na3N, decompose at low temperatures and react with water vapor to form ammonia and the metal hydroxide." Is this simply a matter of warm spots on Mars causing permafrost to melt, and the water causing metal nitrides to decompose into metal hydroxide and ammonia? That would be an inorganic chemical reaction, and would indicate we found the nitrogen. Finding metal nitride would be a very important scientific find.

Shaun Barrett · 2004-07-22 07:57:04

Ammonia or no ammonia, I still think there's life on Mars.
I'd be happy if Mars were sterile but I believe the chances of that are slim. I can't prove a thing, of course, but the balance of probabilities persuades me.
Time will tell.

lunarmark · 2004-07-23 06:00:28

Safer to assume there is no life until we find a shred of evidence to the countrary. The last bastion of hope of finding life, is if there is a hidden microbial life colony clinging on somewhere, somehow, but that myth is perpetuated by those that desperatly want to find it. A lot of people have a lot to gain and loose, and as ever with mankind, I am sure they wont get a little thing like the plain truth get in the way.

lets face it, Mars is like the moon only with red rocks and a hint of more atmoshpere, show me a more sterile looking planet?

Venus, I could undertand, even Titan and Europa, but Mars?
Nope no chance.

Palomar · 2004-07-23 15:00:03

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-life-04o.html]No "L" word yet looms for Mars

*Sorry Shaun.

--Cindy

Shaun Barrett · 2004-07-25 07:13:01

Cindy:-

*Sorry Shaun.

Thanks for the sympathy vote, Cindy, but I'm not unduly concerned at this point about life on Mars. Not that I wouldn't be agog with excitement if an MER stumbled across a macroscopic fossil of something!

I'm just delighted at this bumper space year we're having. Fancy getting two incredibly successful Mars rovers and a Saturn orbiter, all in the same year!!
Believe me, I ain't complainin' 'bout nuthin'!!!
:laugh: :band:

RobertDyck · 2004-07-31 18:26:33

I found where the reporter got the idea of ammonia on Mars. The Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) instrument on Mars Express has initial spectra published at the http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object … =34633]ESA web site. There is a wide image that scrolls left/right by positioning your mouse. It includes several spectra graphs, two of which have peeks tentatively identified as ammonia or nh3. (Don't ask me why they used lower case for graph labels; chemistry usually uses upper case.) This data is highly preliminary; it has to be verified against solar spectra reflected by Mars atmosphere.

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#1 2004-07-15 12:44:45

Re: ammonia in mars atmosphere - mars express found it

#2 2004-07-15 13:58:09

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