Space.com by Elizabeth Howell 3/28/2024
MAGGIE, an early-stage concept at the moment, could search for elusive traces of life in the Martian atmosphere.Mars methane is hard to trace, but a solution might be on the way.
An early-stage airplane concept called MAGGIE will soon kick off a nine-month NASA-funded study to explore its feasibility for soaring over Mars. It won't go to the Red Planet any time soon, if ever, but there's a clear science need for more flying vehicles on Mars.
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, the first heavier-than-air vehicle to soar on Mars, finished 72 flights after arriving with the Perseverance rover in February 2021. While Ingenuity had a hard landing in January 2024 that grounded it for good, there's plenty of room for more flying vehicles in the future.
MAGGIE — short for "Mars Aerial and Ground Intelligent Explorer" — is designed to operate for a Martian year (nearly two Earth years) anywhere around the Red Planet. Flying 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) above the surface, one of its prime missions could be finding methane. That elusive molecule could be a sign of life, but scientists have had little luck figuring out its presence in the Martian atmosphere after decades of searching.
Methane, a possible biosignature gas, has been hard to find on Mars. It pops up now and again in the atmosphere, detectable by spacecraft on or orbiting the Red Planet or by powerful telescopes here on Earth. NASA's long-running Curiosity rover mission (ancestor to Perseverance), for example, has repeatedly detected methane since 2012, but the levels go up and down — a background level of less than 0.5 parts per billion (ppb) molecules of air, sometimes spiking up to 20 ppb.
More:
https://www.space.com/mars-plane-maggie-methane-mystery
