From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Fri Feb 18 2005 - 15:41:34 PST
http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=418683#418683 The two researchers, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke, do think they may have evidence for methane in Mars' atmosphere. Methane cannot last long without being replenished, and it's not easy to replenish it. There are non-biological ways (for example, sunlight + C02 plus water, which can be found on Mars), but life is the easiest way we know of. As the story went, they had a secret meeting -- with whom, we don't know -- and they were discussing releasing this bombshell to either coincide or predate an article submitted to Nature, a premier scientific journal.
But -- and this is the important bit -- there was never any meeting! Nor is there a Nature paper.
I have a friend, Penny Boston<http://www.ees.nmt.edu/boston/>, who studies cave geomicrobiology, just the kind of life this story is talking about. She is good friends with Carol Stoker. I happened to email Penny yesterday to tease her a little about Hoagland's silly claims on C2C last night (he happened to mention her name), and she emailed me back today. She told me that Dr. Stoker had emailed her about all this. Dr. Stoker has issued a statement, which I will quote here:
Dr. Carol Stoker wrote:
A story has appeared in Space.com which quotes us
Here are the facts:
1. On Sunday night we were attending a private party
2. No one at the party identified themselves as a
3. No Nature paper has been submitted with Rio Tinto
4. The work at Rio Tinto is relevant to finding life
So there you go. There is clearly more going to happen here. Will NASA issue a press release about all this? What will space.com do? I do not yet have all the facts. Dr. Stoker is clearly upset with space.com, but I will reserve judgement until I find out more.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6
: Fri Feb 18 2005 - 15:51:54 PST
inaccurately and without permission. The story is based on hearsay
and is factually incorrect.
of space exploration enthusiasts in which there was a
discussion about the possible meaning of the results
from recent Mars missions. We engaged in the
discussion and expressed thoughts and opinions as
individual scientists on our own time and did not
represent ourselves as speaking for NASA.
reporter, and in fact no reporters were present. This
article is based on hearsay about what somebody at the
party thought they heard us say. We think this
represents extremely poor journalistic standards.
results. This claim is simply wrong and we did not
make this claim. The MARTE project has several papers
in preparation that describe the work we are doing at
Rio Tinto and the first results of that work, but
nothing has been submitted yet. Preliminary results
have been published in abstract form at various
scientific meetings. If you want to see what the MARTE
team has actually said about results from Rio Tinto
drilling and its relevance to life on Mars, go to
www.marteproject.com<http://www.marteproject.com/> and click on publications. All
our REAL publications are posted there.
in a subsurface terrestrial environment and can't be
used to infer anything about life on Mars, directly.
The Rio Tinto work by its very nature can't tell us if
there is life on Mars, but certainly helps formulate
the strategy for how to search for life on Mars. One
approach to searching for extant life on Mars is by
drilling. Partly for this reason, the MARTE project
was selected for funding by NASA's ASTEP program, out
of the Science Mission Directorate and is a joint
project between NASA and Spain's Center for
Astrobiology.