First NASA Discovers Mystery Methane Spikes now they find Mystery Oxygen Spikes on Mars

Curiosity has made a discovery that has NASA scientists scratching their heads , to add to the mystery seasonal methane production they now have seasonal Oxygen production through the planet's Spring and Summer , the discovery was made by Curiosity's SAM instrument (Sample Analysis at Mars)

Within this environment, scientists found that nitrogen and argon follow a predictable seasonal pattern, waxing and waning in concentration in Gale Crater throughout the year relative to how much CO2 is in the air. They expected oxygen to do the same. But it didn’t. Instead, the amount of the gas in the air rose throughout spring and summer by as much as 30%, and then dropped back to levels predicted by known chemistry in fall. This pattern repeated each spring, though the amount of oxygen added to the atmosphere varied, implying that something was producing it and then taking it away.

Of course the suspicion was that the variations were due to a problem with the SAM instrument so the scientists double and triple checked the instrument.

The instrument was fine. They considered the possibility that CO2 or water (H2O) molecules could have released oxygen when they broke apart in the atmosphere, leading to the short-lived rise. But it would take five times more water above Mars to produce the extra oxygen, and CO2 breaks up too slowly to generate it over such a short time. What about the oxygen decrease? Could solar radiation have broken up oxygen molecules into two atoms that blew away into space? No, scientists concluded, since it would take at least 10 years for the oxygen to disappear through this process.

So the mystery is a mystery.

“We’re struggling to explain this,” said Melissa Trainer, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland who led this research. “The fact that the oxygen behavior isn’t perfectly repeatable every season makes us think that it’s not an issue that has to do with atmospheric dynamics. It has to be some chemical source and sink that we can’t yet account for.”

“We have not been able to come up with one process yet that produces the amount of oxygen we need, but we think it has to be something in the surface soil that changes seasonally because there aren’t enough available oxygen atoms in the atmosphere to create the behavior we see,” said Timothy McConnochie, assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park and another co-author of the paper.
www.nasa.gov...

Or perhaps it's seeping up from processes occurring beneath the Martian soil , we know Gale Crater contained a lake in its past perhaps to an extent it still does along with the microbes and algae that likely once lived in it .... perhaps.

I believe there is life beneath the Martian surface and one day we will discover it , mysteries like this could be a part of the trail of discovery.

a reply to: gortex

Or perhaps it is simply some chemical source and sink that they can’t yet account for.

a reply to: gortex
It's not mysterious, the universe does whatever it does with or without being observed.

I'm 100% sure there is a logical scientific explanation for the Flux. We just have yet to know why, just a mystery to us not the universe.

We may find residual traces of full fledged organic traces or their effects on Mars inner crusts. Since thee are no tectonic plates on Mars, if there are any gases from organic decomposition, we're likely to find it.

Good find.

originally posted by: moebius
a reply to: gortex

Or perhaps it is simply some chemical source and sink that they can’t yet account for.

That is the most likely outcome but until it's shown how that could occur and that theory has been agreed by peers the chance exists that the source is biological not geological.

I guess it makes more sense if it is some kind of plant life cycle. Plants (as we know them) take in CO2 , Sunlight and produce O2, in the process of photosynthesis. When they die, they decompose, producing Methane, which implies some kind of bacterial interaction.

Could it be as simple as that?

a reply to: gortex

Interesting, we haven't had an official "mystery" on Mars for quite a while. The paper, by the way, concludes with a summary that mentions habitable environments in the past and present:

[These] observations [...] have enhanced our understanding of Mars as a complex planetary system. Geophysical and geochemical results have painted a picture of a formerly habitable planet billions of years in Mars’ past, and measurements of current processes provide indications that Mars may still potentially harbor habitable environments.
Source

Potentially habitable for whom? Cyanobacteria?

When they say that no known process can account for this result, one would assume that rules out any biological explanations as well, but who knows. There's a vast Martian underground we have yet to explore... and a Viking labeled release experiment we still have to repeat (after now more than 40 years).

I would have some probes in the darkest spots on the planet looking for a subterranean life cycle process going on.

originally posted by: machineintelligence
I would have some probes in the darkest spots on the planet looking for a subterranean life cycle process going on.

Or, some satellites that pear beneath the surface. Should be relatively inexpensive compared to rovers.

a reply to: gortex

I still believe that the Viking lander scientists found “signs of life” when they first landed. Then, the whole narrative changed... erm, Roswell, anybody?

The story changed a bit for Capricorn One but the message is clear, “talk, you die”.

Worked for many years (and the older generation is passing on... until we join them... )

Oxygen-methane oxidation-reduction seems pretty indicative of at the least, microbial life.

... or a sewer treatment plant still need intact!!

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

The Viking experiments have always been a fierce topic for me, as well as the experiments and SEM work on the Antarctic Meteorite "Allen Hills 84001".

I also think that life was proven in these experiments, but they are still hotly debated in academic science and there does seem a media bias as well.

a reply to: charlyv

The Six Signa is always touted as the “line to crosss” and the older stuff is not that good as far as statistics go but all the other “science” from the same time is said to be sound.... hum. And that is why I wonder!

That “doubt” nags at me with a vehement dismissal of what was found.

My 2c’s....

a reply to: gortex

ooor...aliens

I still think I'm right and there is complex life on Mars...right now.

a reply to: gortex

this is really weird

maybe they just discovered plants or trees on mars but just havent realised it yet
based on this recent discovery

from 727Sky's thread on the discovery

new findings on nitrous oxide emissions from northern trees surprised scientists

So this shouldnt be that difficult to figure out. What creates oxygen on Earth? Plants. We see an oxygen bump in the spring and summer months. What grows in the spring and summer? Plants. So, obviously there is a place on Mars where plants or something similar grow during the spring and summer periods there, and release oxygen. When their winter rolls around, these plants die and cease producing oxygen. I feel like the answer is right in their faces, but they dont want to admit it.

a reply to: PokeyJoe

and the methane is coming from all those martian cows eating the plants.

a reply to: hounddoghowlie

Didnt say anything about cows. The methane could be produced by microbes in the soil. They could be feeding on organic content in the soil and releasing methane as a by-product.

a reply to: PokeyJoe

no you didn't i did, i was playing off your plants suggestion. it was joke as to what some scientists clam about cattle here on earth causing global... opps climate change.

sorry you didn't get it.

a reply to: PokeyJoe

The problem with that is that it doesn't explain the oxygen drop in winter.

a reply to: gortex

biological.... that's a 20% likelihood....

im leaning more to a chemical cause...

perhaps there's a deposit of Borax under that crater, or a cavern with an abundance of the mineral...

why Borax ? ->

(thanks Bing,com:
Borax is a naturally occurring substance also known as sodium borate.
It contains oxygen, water, sodium, and boran, and is usually found embedded deep in the earth...)

I still harbor the long-ago Mars stories by Burroughs,?
I refer to the 'Clay People; who lived in the clay walls in Mars underground tunnels … that's when Buck Rogers was shown at movie theatres/matinees in a weekly serial series as part of the 1920-30s Social Platform-of=the-times (the Bijou )



some sort of mineral deposit is expelling oxygen from Mars...Methane also has periodic outgassings… since there are not 'shifting plates' there is another source for geology movement and periodic oxygen or methane releases from unknown processes


more reason to invent & deploy a sentient AI robot on the surface of Mars

a reply to: ArMaP

maybe what is happening is that there is an algal bloom

they create oxygen in the summer , and then use it up in the winter when they die