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...

Because its geology is so much like that of Mars, the Norwegian island of Svalbard is a useful site for creating strategies for future mission sampling and analysis. The Arctic Mars Analogue Svalbard Expedition (AMASE) has been using a suite of instruments to detect bacterial populations including spectroscopic equipment and a device that can detect cell wall components. The most interesting of the team's methods may be protein microarrays, which can test for thousands of different molecules simultaneously. "We've passed a major milestone," said Dr. Andrew Steele of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory, and a member of the AMASE team. "We successfully tested an integrated Mars life-detection strategy for the first time and showed that if life on Mars resembles life on Earth at all, we'll be able to find even a single-cell." Source: Press release "Major milestone for detecting life on Mars" via EurekAlert. An image of Dr. Steele on Svalbard (with spectacular scenery in...

A University of Colorado study, using data from the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey orbiters, has concluded that the area surrounding the rover Opportunity's landing site once contained a huge body of water -- up to 330,000 square kilometers. That makes this Martian sea comparable to the Baltic or, as investigator Brian Hynek of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics puts it, 'all of the Great Lakes combined.' Hynek's paper on the Martian sea ("Implications for hydrologic processes on Mars from extensive bedrock outcrops throughout Terra Meridiani") appears in the September 9 issue of Nature, and you can find CU's press release on his work here. The physicist used the thermal emission imaging system on-board Mars Odyssey to infer the size of rocks, studying how larger and smaller particles change temperature at different rates in daylight and at night. His thermal maps show wide areas of bedrock, and tell him that water once extended far beyond the landing area. To...

The BBC talked to SETI@Home researchers and others this morning re the possible SETI reception discussed below. The verdict: "It's all hype and noise," said its chief scientist, Dr Dan Wertheimer. "We have nothing that is unusual. It's all out of proportion." And Dr Paul Horowitz, of Harvard University, who specialises in hunting for possible alien contacts added: "It's not much of anything at all. We're not investigating it further." What will bear investigating is what caused what seems to have been a spurious signal. Should be a good chance to sort out a possible bug in the Arecibo receiving equipment. Check here for more.

New Scientist is carrying the news of a singular find by SETI@Home, the distributed computing project that uses data from the Arecibo radio telescope to look for extraterrestrial radio signals. What is being described as 'the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the nearly six-year history of the SETI@home project' has been detected, emmanating from a source that may or may not be located somewhere between the constellations Pisces and Aries. Dubbed SHGb02+14a, the signal is weak and may in fact be the result of either an unknown natural phenomenon or an artifact in or near the Arecibo dish itself. Centauri Dreams' take: the odd drift in the 1420 MHz signal argues for a local anomaly at Arecibo. Yes, it could be a transmitter on a rapidly spinning planet, but what confounds researchers is that each observation starts at exactly 1420 MHz and then sees the signal begin to drift. What we need are independent observations from other dishes to confirm whether...