Aug. 5, 2008 -- A grand experiment is unfolding on Mars that has already conveyed a key finding to NASA: Don't expect the Internet to bow to the rigors of the scientific process.
Hoping to deflate misconceptions, mistakes and outright lies circulating about a discovery made by the team operating the Mars Phoenix science probe, NASA convened a panel of experts and managers on Tuesday to "announce a non-announcement," as the head of the agency's Mars exploration program, Michael Meyers, put it.
"Unfortunately, there's been this story out that we're hiding something and of course as soon as that story goes out, then people speculate and speculation leads to all kinds of wonderful discoveries that I wish we'd made, but we haven't," Peter Smith, the head of the Phoenix science team, said during a telephone conference call Tuesday that drew more than 100 reporters.
The furor began when Craig Covault, a well-respected aviation and space journalist, wrote an article, subsequently synopsized on his magazine's Web site, that played up his scoop of an impending announcement by the Phoenix science team with the provocative headline "White House Briefed on Potential for Mars Life."
Within two days, bloggers and some media outlets were reporting that not only had NASA had found life on Mars, but that a move was afoot to hide the news from the public.
Space agency managers made a stab at rumor control by putting out text messages to 32,000 Phoenix followers signed up to receive project updates via the Twitter.com networking site.
"Heard about the recent news reports implying I may have found Martian life. Those reports are incorrect," wrote Phoenix's human doppelganger, Veronica McGregor, the mission's lead press officer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Reports claiming there was a White House briefing are also untrue and incorrect."
Covault told Discovery News he stands by his reporting.
"My sources -- plural -- said that the White House has been briefed, but that also includes just being notified (such as via email). It doesn't necessarily mean sitting down with a PowerPoint display.
"I can't help it if the whole ... world runs off and says life was discovered on Mars. It is extremely clear that life has not been discovered on Mars," he added.
Chemistry 101
When saying what did not happen on Mars or in Washington D.C. failed to quell the maelstrom, NASA offered up the team's finding of perchlorate, a common enough compound on Earth -- used in rocket fuels, fertilizers and fireworks -- that seems to have a close but unusual relationship with water. If water is around, some forms of perchlorate tend to disappear.
Perchlorates are ions -- charged particles -- made up of an atom of chlorine and four oxygen atoms. The compounds are stable and do not destroy organic matter under normal circumstances.
"The different perchlorate salts have properties that may bear on the way things work on Mars if -- and that's a really big if -- the results of our little teaspoon full of soil are representative of the whole planet or even significant proportions of the planet," said Michael Hecht, who heads a team of scientists working on soil analysis experiments on Phoenix.
Magnesium perchlorate, for example, is a desiccant, a drying agent, like a sponge or the little silica gel packets tossed in boxes to absorb moisture around electronics devices, Hecht added.
"When these desiccants are just a little bit wet, they actually control the humidity around them -- that's how a cigar humidor works. If it gets very wet, it forms a sticky substance that freezes at very low temperatures like antifreeze," he said.
Most of the time when perchlorates make news on Earth it is because they have been found as contaminants in drinking water. But the substance exists in benign and naturally occurring forms in places such as Chile's hyper-dry Atacama desert.
Scientist initially believed perchlorates would render such environments unsuitable for life, but after more thorough studies in Atacama, researchers discovered bacterial life forms that not only could co-exist with the substance, but were using it as an energy source.
"The story possibility could turn out to be the same for Mars. We don't know yet," said Richard Quinn, a soils expert and Phoenix science team member from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.
Added Hecht, "We've only begun to think about some of these ideas and what their implications might be" on Mars.
Science and the Internet
The discovery of perchlorates on Mars may be a fluke. Scientists are about midway along a painstaking process to rule out other sources of the compound, such as inadvertent contamination by the booster rocket that helped send Phoenix on its way to Mars.
"It's very unlikely, but we're certainly going to look at it," Smith said.
The team also is testing a brew concocted to mirror the chemistry of Mars to see if similar results are found in Phoenix-type soil analyzers in laboratories on Earth. Finally, Phoenix will take a second sample from the exact spot where perchlorates were first found to see if another science instrument will yield the same finding.
Phoenix's suite of instruments includes tiny ovens to heat soil samples, sensors to identify released gases, and miniature chemistry tests that add water to soil to test for soluble ions. Discoveries of perchlorates were made in two water tests.
"Just as we reach conclusions as human beings using all our senses -- our sight, our sense of smell, our hearing, Phoenix was designed with an array of different tools to evaluate soil properties," Hecht said.
If the finding is verified, the discovery will be documented in a formal report, submitted to a scientific journal for evaluation by experts not affiliated with the project and finally published. It is usually at that point that the finding would be made public.
"We don't want to come to you in the media and say we found chocolate on Mars and two weeks later flip-flop and say we made a mistake, it was strawberry," said Hecht."That hurts our reputation. That hurts your reputation. So we want to make sure we get it right."
"When we see something on the Internet that is in fact a speculation, that is attributed to us, and that is wrong that does indeed change the equation a little bit," he added. "All of us here have the same objective, which is to send a consistent story to the public and one in which we believe is correct."
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