Tasting the upper atmosphere of Mars this week on planetary Radio. Radio. Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

Maven is fully operational above the red planet.

We'll welcome back Bruce Ticoski, principal investigator for this mission that hopes to

answer some of our questions about where the Martian atmosphere went.

Bill Nye has the week off, but Bruce Betts is here to help me give away yet another

i Telescope.net account worth a couple hundred bucks. Senior editor Emily Lockawala is just

back from San Francisco and the AGU conference.

The American Geophysical Union conference is always completely overwhelming.

It's more than 20,000 geologists of various kinds descending upon San Francisco every year.

And so I have to go in there with kind of a laser-like focus in order not to be overwhelmed.

So this year I focused on Curiosity, which had a press briefing on Tuesday, and Rosetta,

which had a press briefing the following day, followed by the very first results from that mission.

But Curiosity first, they made an announcement on the very low background levels at about 0.7 parts per billion, which is very low, but detectable with a special enrichment method that they can use in their tunable laser spectrometer.

But then there was this weird spike and it wasn't just a one-time spike.

It was a spike lasting about two months to about 10 times that background level to seven

parts per billion and their detection is pretty solid.

I talked with a lot of scientists at the meeting.

They don't doubt that the tunable laser spectrometer detected methane.

I think there's a little skepticism that it necessarily came from Mars.

I think there's a lot of people who are still thinking that they haven't

disproven that it could have come from the rover but I've read the paper and

...