Mars Plus Water Plus Web Equals NASA Mess

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.