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NASA discovers life-sustaining oxygen on Mars
American space agency, NASA has found oxygen on Mars- a discovery which clearly puts the red planet ahead of others as the survival of humans and almost every other living thing on Earth depend on the vital gas.
Scientists said the discovery of ‘the gas many Earth creatures use to breathe’ is ‘baffling’, because it ‘behaves in a way that so far scientists cannot explain through any known chemical processes’.
Unfortunately, researchers don’t yet know whether the gas was produced by alien organisms or ‘inorganic’ processes, meaning this is not the smoking gun which proves the existence of life of Mars.
The oxygen was detected by the Nasa Curiosity Rover, which has spent seven years on the Red Planet carrying out tests as part of its search for extraterrestrial organisms.
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It found a tiny trace of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere and found its concentration went up and down as the seasons changed a discovery that ‘implies that something was producing it and then taking it away’.
‘We’re struggling to explain this,” said Melissa Trainer, a planetary scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center who led the 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.’
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