February 18, 2005

Why I Love NASA, Part 1,347:

It wasn't exactly the biggest news story in the world -- Iraq and Syria and freakin' bloggers were the "top stories" this week -- but it sure was interesting news: Two NASA scientists studying "data collected by ground-based telescopes and orbiting spacecraft" have come to the conclusion that life probably exists on Mars right now. Not cartoon-style crazy Martians in funny helmets, but simple biological organisms. The kind of stuff anti-bacterial soap is supposed to kill.

The peer-reviewed paper is supposed to be printed in an upcoming issue of the journal Nature. As the idea of life on non-Earth planets has become almost mundane and even major religions such as Catholicism have actively funded astrobiology research, the reported findings of these Ames Research Center scientists shouldn't be that big a deal ... unless you're the Minister of Disinformation at NASA.

An hour ago, this press release was sent out by PR Newswire:

NASA Statement on False Claim of Evidence of Life on Mars

Friday February 18, 9:46 am ET

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- News reports on February 16, 2005, that NASA scientists from Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., have found strong evidence that life may exist on Mars are incorrect.

NASA does not have any observational data from any current Mars missions that supports this claim. 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.

In other words, There is nothing going on at NASA. Don't go getting excited about anything done by NASA. We do grade-school science experiments on a worthless boondoggle Earth orbiter and, when they don't explode, we fly crappy, 1960s-designed space gliders around the planet for no real reason. For more details, please watch our lousy public-access channel, NASA TV, where you can see old film-strips about the solar system as we understood it back in 1981.

How the hell do you make space exploration dull? I don't know, but NASA has certainly achieved it.

UPDATE: This Fark.com comments page has an alleged e-mail from the astrobiologists in question. The e-mail says the scientists were discussing their research at a party, and that they weren't aware a reporter was around, or that anyone they spoke to would pass on the conversation to a reporter. Additionally, it says a paper hasn't been submitted to Nature. It's all a bit milder than NASA's press release, but as other papers by the same scientists have been published in Europe saying pretty much the same thing -- remember, they only said the methane, etc., suggested living things on Mars -- I sure wonder why NASA has to go into damage-control mode in such an ugly, corporate way. Anyway, the only lesson I can draw from any of this is: You want the weird truth? Then go to astrobiologist cocktail parties.

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