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This is not a morality tale about planetary preservation – and what happens if you don’t take good care of your literal ground of being. But after years of assuming that Mars is and always had been inhospitable to life, scientists at NASA are now convinced that an ocean once covered 20% of the surface of Mars. In some places, the ocean was likely a mile in depth. And according to Charles Cockell, a professor of astrobiology at Edinburgh University, “The longer water persists on a planetary body in one location, particularly if there is geological turnover, the more likely it is that it would provide a habitable environment for a suitable duration for life to either originate or proliferate. An ocean would meet this need.”
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What happens when something observed at great distance defies all current expectations and explanations? What happens is an array of strong reactions, including this one from Planetary scientist Todd Clancy of the Space Science Institute – "I don’t think it’s real. … Basic physics says this can’t occur."

And yet, it appears that it has occurred – more than once. It’s just that it wasn’t previously noticed until one day in 2012, when amateur astronomer Wayne Jaeschke of West Chester, Pennsylvania was reviewing footage of Mars that he’d captured in his private observatory.
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Mars has been hitting the headlines lately as scientists reveal more and more about the Red Planet’s past. But could this latest piece of evidence really be it? Have scientists really found solid proof of life on Mars?

Strange methane emissions have been detected by NASA researchers in data collected by one of the rover Curiosity’s instruments, and scientists believe that they are being caused by life forms, most likely bacteria. On Earth, life forms are the primary producers of methane, although there could be other possible explanations.
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In 1976, the Viking program’s orbiter and lander reached Mars, and the lander’s life experiments returned data that the scientists who had designed them had expected to see if living organisms were present in the soil. However, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, fearing that a positive finding about life on the red planet would cause their Mars funding to be diverted to the manned spaceflight program, issued various denials and succeeded in clouding the picture sufficiently to insure that robotic programs would continue.
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