Submission + - Bad Breath on Mars (newscientist.com)
Dr. Scatterplot writes: New Scientist has a short blurb about work showing that Curiosity, NASA's VW Bug-sized rover launching at the end of 2011, can sniff out methyl mercaptan (CH3SH), a prominent compound in bad breath and flatus (farts), and the additive responsible for the smell of natural gas. Steve Vance and colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab used an instrument similar to the Tunable Laser Spectrometer, which will look for methane from the martian surface, to show that the instrument can also pick up absorption features for CH3SH. The journal article discusses methyl mercaptan's role as a decay product and its potential importance as a marker for life.
