[hilyen]

> The instrument can look for methane in the same way. “It turns out that methane also has a spectral signature in the same wavelength range, and that’s what has allowed us to be sensitive to methane,” EMIT principal investigator Robert Green said at a press conference, according to Space.com’s Mike Wall.

Lol "it turns out". Did they troll Congress and sell them a mineral detector? Of course they knew methane had a spectral signature.

EDIT: No idea why people downvoting, I think it's hilarious and good we can detect it.

[blacksmith_tb]

I read that as "we built the detector to be sensitive to the wavelengths of the minerals we wanted to monitor, and methane's spectra are in that range, so it works well for picking it up".

[jacobjjacob]

Of course they could have known that beforehand, but it sounds like they weren’t designing a methane detector so the fact that it works so well as one is what “turned out” I think. Also articles are really good and taking one quote from a big technical answer and making the speaker sound stupid

[mturmon]

Yeah, but CH4 detection was not why the mission was flown, so the PI is being careful to make this distinction.