Plumes of methane identified on Mars - Finding could influence choice of landing site for Mars...

Nature News ^ | 21 October 2008 | Eric Hand

[neverdem]

What's the taxable carbon footprint?

[NormsRevenge]

oh sure, spend all that money , all to land at the smelliest part of the planet.. something smells :-}

[DainBramage]

Place Uranus joke here.

[Army Air Corps]

Ping!

[tongue-tied]

Click: Houston, Major Tom here...we have the landing site in sight. 100 meters...75 meters...50 meters...Initiating steering jets for 7 degree right turn............."

This is ground control to Major Tom, your circuit's dead, there's something wrong. Can you hear me Major Tom? Can you hear me Major Tom?

[Names Ash Housewares]

Start the reactor!

Free Mars!

The planet is begging for exploration.

[Zuben Elgenubi]

Place Uranus joke here.

They won't Klingon.

[Flavius]

wow more organic material from dinosaurs

[NonValueAdded]

Mars pharts?

[KarlInOhio]

Michael Mumma is NASA's methane plume expert, much to the sorrow of his officemates.

[Zuben Elgenubi]

His ideas are known as “Big Bang Theory”

[biff]

Taxes, smaxes, methane will run that pink 57 Cadillac they took up yonder to check the place out. Elvis called and asked if they could bring it up.

[Yo-Yo]

"Pardon me."

[DainBramage]

I wonder if these Plumes are any relation to Valerie Plume? Could the CIA be involved.

[Dumpster Baby]

Found the pasture at last!

[neverdem]

Sun's protective 'bubble' is shrinking

New First-Aid Products Could Save Lives, Officials Say

Just a single hair can provide many pluripotent stem cells

FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.

[NutCrackerBoy]

NASA's next Mars rover will be able to analyse, at levels of parts per trillion, the fractional concentrations of the carbon isotopes in each methane molecule. Life on Earth prefers to process lighter carbon-12 atoms. And so, on Mars, methane freighted with carbon-12 could be a sign of a biological origin. -Eric Hand

Let me see if I understand. A known fraction of the carbon on Mars is carbon-12. The methane being plumed contains an unknown fraction of carbon-12. Once we are able to measure it, if there is a higher level of carbon-12 in the plumage, the greater we would estimate the probability to be that the processes that produce (or produced) the methane are (or were) biological.

Because the biological processes we know about tend to "prefer" lighter carbon.

[rfp1234]

It’s Marvin the Fartin’ Martian.

[marron]

So it turns out that hydrocarbons are the basic building block of the universe... the universe is made of hydrocarbons.

[dfwgator]

“Where’s the Kaboom?”