Life on Mars? No evidence yet, despite press report from last week.

[pmbryant]

Despite false claims in the press last week that some NASA scientists had discovered evidence for present life on Mars, there is no such evidence yet.

The Space.com story from Feb. 16 was based on "inaccurate hearsay," according to one of the scientists involved, and on Friday, NASA actually issued an official denial. Quite rare for an organization that normally thrives on talk about the potential for life elsewhere in the Solar System.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6994667/">NASA rejects claims of life on Mars

NASA on Friday issued an unusual denial of a report that its researchers saw strong evidence for life's existence on present-day Mars, based in part on atmospheric methane readings. Other scientists involved in Mars research said the jury was still out on the meaning of Martian methane, but they agreed that the preliminary findings were well worth a follow-up.

Earlier this week, sources told the weekly Space News that Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke, astrobiologists at NASA's Ames Research Center, had submitted a paper to the journal Nature outlining the evidence for biological activity on the Red Planet.

But in Friday's statement, NASA said such reports were "incorrect":

"NASA does not have any observational data from any current Mars missions that supports this claim," the statement read. "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."

I've written more on this here: http://pmbryant.typepad.com/b_and_b/2005/02/life_on_mars_no.html

Here is the thread posted about this in the Science forum last week. I felt the correction of the original report deserved a new thread with a new headline.

--Peter

[applegrove]

1. Someone get Bush in that flight suit right away!! He already has a bubble

that allows him to not need any 'air'.

[gottaB]

2. Thanks for the due diligence, Peter

Space.com is not a source I regularly use. Do you think this is a fluke, or does it fit a pattern that you have seen in their reporting?

[pmbryant]

3. I'm not very familiar with Space.com

So I'm not aware of any pattern.

From what I can tell, they appear to be generally reputable (they have some kind of partnership with MSNBC), which makes this journalistic carelessness harder to fathom.

--Peter

[NationalEnquirer]

4. I was suspicious of the article.

It seemed a bit too optimistic to have cleared "official channels".
Upon reading however, it looked like alot of wishful thinking, and I surely wasn't led to believe that there was indeed life.
I think part of the problem is the way reporters try to "sex up" their stories..