[jennyp]

No. What's more of a head-scratcher is the article we were discussing over here at CrEvo:TED. It seems that David Whitehouse, the BBC's science reporter, may have jumped the gun & misread the abstract to an upcoming talk that one of the Mars scientists was going to make.

(a find that TheCrusader had made, above)

Since the article came out about the ensuing difficulty in confirming the story, nobody's said anything. Whitehouse hasn't retracted his story. But the story does say that the ammonia that was found was not in the vicinity of the Beagle bags, which clearly implies that they did indeed see a signature of ammonia in a specific place (not near the Beagle site).

Beats me.

[AndrewC]

Whitehouse hasn't retracted his story. But the story does say that the ammonia that was found was not in the vicinity of the Beagle bags, which clearly implies that they did indeed see a signature of ammonia in a specific place (not near the Beagle site).

In my post I was alluding to the discordance between the hours-long existence of ammonia in the Martian atmosphere and the loss of the Beagle probe last year. Plus, I did not know that the location of the lost lander had been discovered.