NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has found the largest amount of methane ever measured during its mission on the Red Planet -- about 21 parts per billion units by volume (ppbv), the US space agency said.
One ppbv means that if you take a volume of air on Mars, one billionth of the volume of air is methane, according to the US space agency.
The finding came from the rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) tunable laser spectrometer.
It is exciting because microbial life is an important source of methane on Earth, but methane can also be created through interactions between rocks and water, NASA said in a statement.
Curiosity does not have instruments that can definitively say what the source of the methane is, or even if it is coming from a local source within Gale Crater or elsewhere on the planet.
"With our current measurements, we have no way of telling if the methane source is biology or geology, or even ancient or modern," said SAM Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard ...
