Here's an image of the possible Martian pack ice, taken by Mars Express' High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), which is imaging the entire planet in full colour, 3-D and with a resolution of about 10 metres. The 3-D capability allows us to see Martian topography in unprecedented detail. Look here for other extraordinarily detailed images. This image, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA's Mars Express spacecraft, during orbit 32, shows what appears to be a dust-covered frozen sea near the Martian equator. It shows a flat plain, part of the Elysium Planitia. The scene is a few tens of kilometres across, centred on latitude 5º North and longitude 150º East. Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) Meanwhile, findings from Mars Express were discussed in a news conference on the 25th. To say the session was packed with news is an understatement: we have not only the possible pack ice but discussions of Martian methane and formaledhyde and their significance for...

Storing and preserving living cells at low temperatures is a staple of science fiction. Who knows how many fictional interstellar journeys have taken place with the crew in cryogenic suspension (my favorite, Van Vogt's "Far Centaurus," springs quickly to mind, but there are many possible references). And with the possibility of Martian ice -- even an ancient Martian sea -- under observation by Mars Express, the question of life surviving in extreme conditions is drawing increased attention. Which is why the discovery of of a new bacterium called Carnobacterium pleistocenium is so interesting. NASA astrobiologist Richard Hoover and his team found the anaerobic bacteria, which grow on sugars and proteins in the absence of oxygen, at the U.S. Army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory tunnel north of Fairbanks, Alaska. The tunnel was created in the 1960s to allow scientists to study permafrost as part of the preparation for building the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline. Hoover's...

Oliver Morton's excellent MainlyMartian weblog has a cautionary analysis of Vittorio Formisano's work on Martian formaldehyde, which we looked at on the 18th. From the weblog: I've posted on the formaldehyde story before. And, even more now than then, I think Formisano is making a mistake...[S]o do a number (quite possibly, from what I hear, all) of his colleagues on the PFS, including those who have more experience modelling atmospheric chemistry and interpreting spectrometer data than Formisano has. I don't want to rehash everything in the earlier post on the subject, but the gist is that a) formaldehyde is expected to have a very short lifetime in the atmosphere, and thus it is very hard to explain how there could be so much of it and b) earth-based telescopes have looked for the stuff and found no evidence for it even at levels far lower than those that Formisano appears to see. You can read Morton's comments here. He has also written thoughtfully on the 'Elysium Sea' (the...

The recent finding of a possible ancient sea on Mars has been one of the hotter topics at the ESA Mars Science Conference. The research team, led by John Murray of the UK's Open University, presented its findings at the conference on the 21st, with a paper coming up in Nature next month. One team member, Jan-Peter Muller of University College London had this to say about the significance of the find: "The fact that there have been warm and wet places beneath the surface of Mars since before life began on Earth, and that some are probably still there, means that there is a possibility that primitive micro-organisms survive on Mars today. This mission has changed many of my long-held opinions about Mars - we now have to go there and check it out." Amen to that, since even with instruments like Mars Express' High Resolution Stereo Camera, which offered up the 3D images used in this work, we need hard evidence from the surface before we can claim that life is anything more than a...

The Mars Express conference being held at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands runs through the 25th, and as we saw yesterday is already generating its share of high quality data. The program for the meeting can be found here. Of particular interest will be the special session on exobiology and the hunt for life on Mars that will be held on Thursday the 24th. We should get more information about that conjectural Martian ocean (discussed yesterday) at that gathering. Meanwhile, six papers published online by the journal Science have brought forth new findings about the early history of Mars. "If you want to resolve the big question about life on Mars, you want to go to the right places and get samples," said Brown University's John Mustard. "The new research tells us where some of those places may be." Mustard is part of an international team using data from the Mars Express OMEGA spectrometer that is mapping the surface of the planet in both visible...

The Mars Express spacecraft has sent back images that some are interpreting as the broken plates of a Martian sea, surviving in the form of pack ice. New Scientist is running the story, saying the sea appears to be about 800 by 900 kilometers in size and is found 5 degrees north of the Martian equator. From the story: Images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express show raft-like ground structures - dubbed "plates" - that look similar to ice formations near Earth's poles, according to an international team of scientists. But the site of the plates, near the equator, means that sunlight should have melted any ice there. So the team suggests that a layer of volcanic ash, perhaps a few centimetres thick, may protect the structures. We should have more on this tomorrow, since the leader of the research team, John Murray at the Open University, UK is supposed to present the findings at 1st Mars Express Science Conference in Noordwijk, the Netherlands,...

The Bad Astronomy site is reporting that Space.com's story about possible life on Mars has blown up. There apparently is no upcoming article in Nature, nor did researchers Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke engage in a private meeting with space officials to discuss the implications of their work along Spain's Rio Tinto. You can read the whole thing here. Later: Space.com's revised story is now available.

This news release from NASA headquarters may slow down the current life on Mars story: News reports on February 16, 2005, that NASA scientists from Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., have found strong evidence that life may exist on Mars are incorrect. NASA does not have any observational data from any current Mars missions that supports this claim. The work by the scientists mentioned in the reports cannot be used to directly infer anything about life on Mars, but may help formulate the strategy for how to search for martian life. Their research concerns extreme environments on Earth as analogs of possible environments on Mars. No research paper has been submitted by them to any scientific journal asserting martian life. Centauri Dreams note: The NASA press release discusses the work of Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke at Ames Research Center, published as an exclusive by Space.com and described in the February 17 entry below. Today's entry describing Vittorio Formisano's work...

New Scientist continues the focus on possible Martian life with a story on Vittorio Formisano, a European Space Agency scientist who believes he has found formaldehyde on the Red Planet. His data come from the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer aboard Mars Express, and indicate a formaldehyde concentration of 130 parts per billion. Formisano, from the Institute of Physics and Interplanetary Science in Rome, will present these results next week at a conference in the Netherlands. Formisano's views are bound to be controversial; the scientist believes the formaldehyde is being produced by the oxidation of methane, and says that 2.5 million tons of methane would need to be generated each year to create this much of it. New Scientist writer Jenny Hogan quotes Formisano in A Whiff of Life on the Red Planet: "I believe that until it is demonstrated that non-biological processes can produce this, possibly the only way to produce so much methane is life," [Formisano] says. "My conclusion is...

In NASA Researchers Claim Evidence of Present Life on Mars, Space.com writer Brian Berger reports that two NASA scientists have evidence that life may exist on Mars. Which is true enough, though not in itself new, since uneven methane signatures in the Martian atmosphere (detected in 2004 by Mars Express) have already revealed the possibility of an underground biosphere. What Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley bring to the table are their findings in southwestern Spain, where the the acidic ecology of the Rio Tinto offers an environment somewhat similar to Mars. It's telling that concentrations of the mineral salt jarosite have been identified both on Mars and in hot springs and bodies of water like the Rio Tinto. If life could exist in an underground microbial ecosystem under conditions not terribly dissimilar from Mars, it might also be found on Mars itself. But proceed with caution. Stoker and Lemke won't have their paper out until May;...

In The New and Improved SETI, the SETI Institute's Seth Shostak weighs in on the Allen Telescope Array, the radio telescope installation that should give a boost to the SETI search as well as offering key research tools to more conventional astronomy. Shostak lists three advantages the ATA will offer SETI researchers, perhaps the most important being the array's ability to make maps of the sky. "In other words," says Shostak, "it's like a radio camera, producing images." Here's his explanation of one ATA advantage: ...the ability to break up a large field of view into small (radio) pixels is also good for the SETI crowd. Consider this: you're a radio astronomer, and your day job is mapping stuff like the Andromeda galaxy. You want your radio pixels to be in a regular, row-and-column matrix, like the members of a marching band. It's a pixel arrangement similar to what your digital camera's CCD has. Fine. But for SETI purposes, you could spread the pixels around a bit, like a few...

290 miles northeast of San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley and the SETI Institute are building an observatory for galactic and extragalactic radio astronomy at Hat Creek. The Paul Allen Telescope Array (ATA 32), named after Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who is a major donor for the project, is to consist of 350 networked 6.1-meter radio dishes spread out along 2.6 acres on the property. In addition to breakthrough radio astronomy, ATA 32 will enable the most comprehensive search for intelligent extraterrestrial signals (SETI) ever attempted. According to this Lab Note by David Pescovitz at Berkeley's College of Engineering , the Allen Telescope Array will speed up the SETI search by a factor of 100. Significantly, the system is designed so that astronomers can do other radio astronomy while the SETI search proceeds. Pescovitz quotes William "Jack" Welch, a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and astronomy who holds UC Berkeley's first Chair in the...

The news from Meridiani Planum continues to be encouraging. A special issue (Dec. 3) of Science offers eleven articles by scientists connected with the Mars rover missions, this marking the first peer-reviewed presentation of data from the Opportunity rover. The articles cover Opportunity's first 90 days exploring the Eagle Crater, before it moved on to the large crater called Endurance. From Steve Squyres, Cornell professor of astronomy, who led the team of rover scientists along with Dr. Ray Arvidson of Washington University (St. Louis), as quoted in a Jet Propulsion Laboratory press release: "Liquid water was once intermittently present at the Martian surface at Meridiani, and at times it saturated the subsurface. Because liquid water is a key prerequisite for life, we infer conditions at Meridiani may have been habitable for some period of time in Martian history," according to Squyres, Arvidson and other co-authors. And in one of the papers he wrote for Science, "In Situ...

The science of life detection may get a boost from ongoing work in Chile's remote Atacama Desert. Said to be one of the most arid regions on Earth, the Atacama is a prime testing ground for an automated, solar-powered rover named Zoe, which was developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center. The idea: use the Atacama as an analogue to Mars, drafting the needed protocols for life detection in hostile environments. According to a NASA press release, "Scientists also plan to map the habitats of the area, including its morphology, geology, mineralogy, texture, physical and elemental properties of rocks and soils; document how life modifies its environment; characterize the geo- and biosignatures of microbial organisms and draft science protocols to support a discovery of life." Technology buffs may want to download CMU's EventScope software, which scientists will use to see the Atacama through the 'eyes' of the rover. Eventscope is available here. The...