# NASA

## Mars Museum Alliance

**November 23, 2004**

**1:00 p.m. CST**

Overview:

Dr. Michael Mumma, Director of the Goddard Center for Astrobiology at
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, discusses pre-publication results
about enhanced abundances of methane on Mars seen from ground-based
telescopes. This information was published in NASA's Astrobiology
magazine on March 30, 2005 and is on-line at
<http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=899>

Coordinator Thank you. Hello, participants, welcome to today's
conference call. At the request of our call leader, this conference is
being recorded for transcription purposes. Any objections, one must
disconnect at this time. I would like to now turn the call over to our
host, Ms. Anita Sohus. Ma\'am.

Anita Good morning. Thank you. This morning, we have another one of our
seminar type of telecons with researchers in the field with current
news. I was able to go the planetary science meeting a couple of weeks
ago in Louisville, Kentucky, which is one of the two or three primary
places where planetary science results are presented. One of the
speakers there was Dr. Mike Mumma of Goddard Space Flight Center and I
have asked him this morning if he could present to us, talk to us a
little bit about their observations of methane and water on Mars. Mike,
we do record this phone call for transcription purposes only; and I can
hold that transcription or I can send it to you for approval before we
post it since you haven't published yet.

Mike Yes. We're actively trying to get the paper submitted. I'm just
working on it now. I would like to review the text before it is posted
and I am actually going on an observing run Friday morning. I'll be
very, very busy between now and then. I return next Thursday morning.

Anita That would probably work. It takes them a couple days, usually, to
get the transcription to me, so I'll e-mail it to you and when you get a
chance, take a look at it.

Mike Good, okay.

Anita I want to remind everybody, you're all pretty good about it, but
if you've got to have typing or side conversations, please mute. When we
get into questions and answers, if you could identify who you are and
your affiliation. Mike, I'm going to let you introduce yourself.

Mike Okay, very good. My name is Mike Mumma. I actually am here as
leader of a group that does spectroscopy of planets and comets. We've
been working on Mars for many years; and in particular, back in '89, we
acquired data of the planet; these are spectral observations in the near
infrared where methane has a strong band. The first data we acquired in
the methane region was taken at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in
'89 and later was analyzed by an associate that I invited to come here,
Dr. Vladimir Krasnopolsky. We thought that we had weak evidence for
possible presence of methane on Mars in that database. That was
published in 1997 and it was advertised as merely a tentative
indication.

Subsequently, we began to embark upon a campaign to search for methane
with more sensitive instruments, spectrometers in particular, at several
of the world's major telescopes. The work began at the NASA Infrared
Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea, Hawaii in 1999 and we had indications
of a detection of a line in our very first observation. We then
requested Director Discretionary Time and that was granted by the
director of the observatory. We began to observe it in earnest in 2001
and then later proposed to extend the investigation, using a more
powerful spectrometer that is in place at the Gemini South Telescope in
Chile. With that instrument, we've now detected two spectral lines of
methane simultaneously and with very good signal-to-noise ratio and at
the same time, we detected spectral lines of water vapor in the Mars
atmosphere.

When we analyze this data according to standard principles, we then can
actually measure the abundance of methane and water all the way from the
north to the south regions of the planet along the slit. Each little
pixel along the slit gives us a spectrum and we typically add those to
improve signal-to-noise ratio, but not so much as to destroy the spatial
information that we're seeking.

What I reported last week was something that we've been telling our
scientific colleagues privately for over a year. Namely, that we are
detecting methane on Mars and it does appear to have a very significant
enhancement or increase in its abundance over certain areas of the
planet. The results I reported last week at the DPS, actually I guess it
was two weeks ago, shows a major abundance increase over a region called
Syrtis Major. This is just north of the giant Hellas impact basin for
those of you who have a map of Mars in your head or one in front of you.
We found that the abundance there was up to a factor of eight to ten
times higher than it was at the polar regions, high latitudes of north
and south. This is because there are two lines detected in the spectrum
taken at Gemini South and because we have simultaneous measurements of
water, we can compare the water with measurements acquired by orbiting
spacecraft on the same day that we observed.

We find that the spatial distribution, that is the distribution of water
seen along the meridian from north to south on the planet, in our
measurements is in good agreement with that obtained from the thermal
emission spectrometer on the Mars Observer spacecraft. So this gives us
confidence that we're analyzing the data properly and, of course,
Vladimir's additional belief to the analysis of the methane
measurements. I think that's just a little background.

I should mention that some of the key colleagues involved here are at
universities and others are here at NASA Goddard. Bob Novak at Ionia
College in New Rochelle, New York is a key player, along with Michael
DiSanti here; Boncho Bonev; Neil Dello Russo; Michael Smith, who's also
responsible for the atmospheric science in Mars Odyssey acquired with
TES; and Atelaka Wakgama, who is a scientist working on some spectral
analysis routines with us.

Anyway, there it is and so I think at this point, I'll just turn it over
to Anita and let her go on from there.

Anita I guess one question would be, what's the significance of the
methane?

Mike That's, of course, what everyone wants to know. Let me just say
right off the bat, that methane on Mars is very different from finding
methane on Saturn, or Uranus, or Jupiter. The reason is that the
atmosphere of Mars is oxidizing, I mean to say that unlike the other
three planets I mentioned, you would not expect to find methane on Mars,
unless it was currently being released. By current, I mean it has to be
ongoing in a period of a century or so, because after that length of
time, if three centuries, even if only photolysis or photodestruction
were eliminating the abundance of a methane, if you didn't have current
release, it would quickly vanish entirely, so there wouldn't be any
methane present in the atmosphere of Mars if it was not being currently
released.

Anyway, the issue then is if it's being released, where is it being
released, in what abundance is it being released and then finally, what
can we say about the origin of the methane that we see? And that, of
course, is the one where science writers get very excited, because it
gives them the opportunity to write zingy headlines. But be very
cautious, there are means for producing methane that have nothing to do
with presence of life and there are other ways of producing it that does
indicate the presence of life.

At this point, we must be very cautious and we must say that we do not
confirm or deny any of these particular mechanisms. I'll go over those
and tell you what they are in a minute, but the bottom line is that what
we've done is identified a region where methane appears to be released
in high abundance and this, clearly, will be one that the scientists who
are working with Mars Express and others will look at very closely,
amongst other regions, to see if they can reproduce these results.

Anita So this abundance is not ephemeral, it continues and it continues
over that one area pretty much?

Mike In fact, that's an interesting question. We actually have maps of
many different regions of Mars and one of the reasons we haven't
published until recently or announced this finding is because we find
that the presence of methane depends on season and position on the
planet. So we're still heavily involved in processing our database to
identify exactly which are the forcing terms; is it season; is it
temperature; is it solely location; does the source turn on and off as
winter falls, for example, does it turn off or is it present at all
times?

The two other investigations that have attempted to measure methane and
reported some success, actually, they either agree or disagree with us
depending on how you look at them. One of the investigations was done
with a telescope in Mauna Kea called the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope
and the leader of that team was Vladimir Krasnopolsky. That group really
has only five hours of data taken in 1999 and no data since then. But
they analyzed their data last fall and claim a detection of methane over
the volcanic region called the Tharsis Ridge. This is actually all the
way around the other side of the planet from where we see an
enhancement, almost 180 degrees opposite in position. They claim that
their mixing ratio was about ten parts per billion, plus or minus three
parts per billion, which is consistent with our low polar abundances,
but it's certainly far smaller than the amount we see in the equatorial
region over Syrtis Major.

The other team on Mars Express, led by Vittorio Formisano, an Italian
scientist and PI for the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer has the paper in
press and science and they began observing Mars in January and February
and have reported in this paper, detection of methane in their spectra
acquired in those two months and then later again in May of this year.
But the problem is that they are seeing, they report, at least,
variation in the abundance and in the highest abundances, their
abundances are about 40 parts per billion.

What's interesting about their data is that they began observing when a
significant dust storm was in progress and dust has the misfortune of
actually obscuring the first ten kilometers of the Mars atmosphere, so
that what you really see is only the gas and dust above that level. This
would, of course, mean a reduction in the apparent abundance of methane
and water for example, in their spectrum and they do, in fact, see the
signatures that would imply that this is happening; so we should regard
their measurements as lower limits to the true abundance.

So all this is to say that we don't really have a clear picture yet, but
we have every confidence that we will get one within the next year or
so, as the orbiting spacecraft return more data and as we analyze more
of our data and obtain more data from the ground. That's a long-winded
answer to your question about variability and is it always present or
not. We don't know yet and there's good evidence that it does vary with
both season and position on the planet.

Anita Now, is it only Mars Express of the orbiters that has the
capability?

Mike That's right. The reason it can do this is because it happens to
sample the spectral region in which methane has a strong spectral band,
vibrational band as we call it. It has a strong spectral feature and
although their instrument has only moderate spectral resolving power,
they claim that they can detect methane in the one part of this spectral
feature. No other instrument in Mars orbit can do this. Although, we and
others are actively planning to propose instruments that would go into
Mars orbit, specifically for this purpose, because it is clearly one of
the major questions now that has emerged and has the potential for, in
the long run, driving much of the Mars Exploration Program. We need to
understand exactly where these events occur and what the conditions are
that limit the release of methane, if any.

Anita You mentioned some mechanisms for release, can you talk about
that?

Mike Let's start with the abiotic. One possibility, this is driven by
this effect being observed on Earth, is that there is some hot regolith,
or sub-surface region on Mars. On Earth, for example, in subduction
zones where one tectonic plate is moving under another, water, carbon
dioxide, and organics are carried down along with the rock that is
subsiding or being subducted; and when it reaches the hot region it
undergoes a chemical reaction with the rock that is already there,
causing it to be converted from one form to another. In fact, it's an
oxidation of iron that occurs from a form called olivine to a form known
as magnetite. The process consumes oxygen and the subducted material
gives up that oxygen and leaves the hydrogen and carbon alone to combine
and produce methane.

Methane is observed to be released in such regions and also the
Mid-Atlantic Ridge for example, and even in volcanoes, it's a very weak
and rare gas that is sometimes emitted. But the bottom line is that we
do know that these geothermal processes on Earth can produce methane in
a way that is not dependent on biology. So you can imagine that if Mars
still had such geothermal processes going on today, that we might see
some release of methane from them.

It's important to point out that apparently, there has been no active
volcanism on Mars for millions of years and in addition, there's no
evidence for active plate tectonics on Mars; so this strange other tests
that we can provide to explain it in this way.

Another possibility is that we have a deep biosphere. For example, if
Mars was once wet as we now know it was from having different lines of
evidence, but most dramatically from the results obtained by the
Opportunity lander, which found evidence that this was once the site of
a salty sea. We are confident it was wet at one time and if there was
any biology present at that time, it could have migrated deep
underground later on and still be resident there in some regions.

On Earth, we know very well that certain kinds of bacteria called
methanogens will produce methane by their metabolism and basically
converting CO~2~ and water to methane trace gas. We don't know whether
that's actually the origin of this methane on Mars; and, indeed, we
don't even know whether it was biological in origin, is it of recent
origin or could it have been stored from a time when Mars was young?
Maybe in the first billion years of its history or less, in which there
was some kind of a biosphere that created methane at that time, and it
was somehow stored in methane hydrates or other kinds of traps
underground.

We think we understand how to test those ideas. That is, of course, the
important point, is that we not leap to a conclusion based on our
current limited knowledge, but that we identify additional key tests of
each of these respective hypotheses, then go forward and make those
tests and finally begin to narrow down the chances or the possibilities
until the most likely one emerges, whatever that may be.

Anita Would the instrument that you're thinking about proposing, would
that be on an orbiter or would it be in situ?

Mike We are actually looking at a telescope placed at the Mars L1
Lagrange point. It is in orbit, about the Lagrange point, it's about a
million miles from Mars placed on the sunward side, so it always looks
at the sunward hemisphere. It would be equipped with a very
high-resolution infrared spectrometer and could observe any point on the
dayside of Mars for up to 12 hours, 12 ½ quarter hours as Mars rotates.
This would give one the opportunity to examine diurnal forcing as the
temperature changes day/night, one could look for evidence that changing
temperatures near the surface are affecting the release of methane and
could also conduct beach searches for carbon-13 methane, which is one
test we'd like to apply to constrain the prospects of biology. As you
probably know, bioforms on Earth produce methane with depleted carbon-13
by about 3% relative to the cosmic value, so this is a very challenging
measurement, but we believe that's quite feasible.

Then, in addition, there are a number of other things we think are
important to try, the measure of the deuterium content of the methane
being released, because this will test whether the methane reflects the
deuterium value when Mars was young or whether it reflects the current
value, would help to constrain the possible production mechanisms and
even the time at which the material was produced. Deuterium, for
example, today in the atmosphere is enriched by more than a factor of
two relative to the deuterium that was found when Mars was ancient, was
based on when Mars was young, based on the meteoritic record. So there
are many different avenues we want to explore.

The other possibility is to put another class of instrument in orbit
close down and lower to our Mars orbit. There's a proposal that has been
considered for a Mars Scout mission for which Mark Allen is the
principal investigator, Mark is at JPL. This payload, called Marvel,
would actually look at the sun and basically, what we call a solar
occultation measurement; and as it orbits Mars, it would make very
sensitive measurements of trace species along this path towards the sun.
It gains an event vantage, because the signatures can be enhanced by the
large air mass that is seen if you look at the sun when it's just over
the horizon, so we'll just have to see. I suspect that there will be a
great deal of interest in seeing one or both of these projects going
forward, but we have a ways to go before we're ready to do this.

Anita That's great. Does anybody have some questions for Mike?

Steve This is Steve Lee in Denver \[Museum of Nature and Science\]. I
was just curious what the actual spatial resolution of your spectral
measurement is over Syrtis Major?

Mike We actually average several rows in our spectrometer together for
each of our measurements and the net if expressed in terms of latitude
resolution, we get about three degrees per row; so when we average three
rows, our latitudinal resolution is ten degrees. Now, of course, in
addition because we're a ground-based instrument, we have to worry about
smearing of the beam, due to atmospheric turbulence and this causes a
bit more spreading, so I'd say that our real resolution is about 20
degrees of latitude at the equator. That's, of course, much less than we
would really like to identify specific event regions, because you would
really like to get down within a given crater and begin to look for
emergents on areas of the crater wall below the \-- oscillator for
example or do it from space near Mars where we can get very high
resolution.

The telescope at L1, which I mentioned, would achieve, if it were one
meter in diameter, it would achieve a resolution at Mars of about five
kilometers and, of course, the orbiting instrument in low Mars orbit
would have less resolution, because it has to average spectra over a
significant time while the spacecraft is in orbit, so you get smearing
and lose spatial resolution for that reason.

Anita What's the parts per billion that you're seeing, can you tell us
that?

Mike Sure. In the Polar Regions far away from the equatorial zone, we
see this main source, we're seeing mixing ratios and I use mixing ratios
because they are not dependent on surface pressure. Deeper regions then
are compensated for by dividing by the larger column density for the
main atmospheric constituent.

Anyway, we're seeing typically 20 to 60 parts per billion in the high
latitude regions and that will come down just a little because of some
technical corrections we're making right now. It probably will come out
to around 20 to 40. Then in the equatorial region, we're seeing several
hundred parts per billion, a factor of eight to ten larger and the
enhanced region seems to have about a 20 degree span in latitude, where
the enhancement is largest.

We've done similar measurements over the Great Rift Valley, Valles
Marineris, which I haven't talked about until just now in this
teleconference and the evidence there supports significant enhancements
over that rift valley at the time we observed. By the way, these
measurements (the ones that I reported at the DPS meeting) were made in
late summer in the Northern Hemisphere. The first data set I discussed
over Syrtis Major represented the late summer season that pelsobest at
155 degrees, as it's called for the techies out there, and the
observations over Valles Marineris, we report were made at the Autumnal
Equinox when the sun was over the equator.

Anita Are there other places besides those two that you've seen this?

Mike Yes, we have data spanning three years of good quality, but
however, I didn't report those in detail. It's not that we're being
cagey; frankly, it's just extremely demanding to reduce the data in a
rigorous fashion.

Anita I was wondering, do you have to account for methane in the Earth's
atmosphere in your measurements?

Mike Oh, you do. It's a very severe problem. Methane as many of you know
is abundant in Earth's atmosphere and the mixing ratio is about 1,500
parts per billion, which is only about a factor of six more than we're
seeing on Mars, by the way, in this rich region. But on Earth, we have a
lot more gas in our atmosphere, so the amount of methane above us is
larger by more than a factor of almost 500. So we're always trying to
avoid the severe absorbance, if you like, from the same lines of methane
on Earth that we're searching for our Mars. If there were no tricks to
help us, we would not be able to do this from the ground at all.

Fortunately, one trick we use is the well-known Doppler Effect. Everyone
is familiar with this from hearing train whistles change their pitch as
they go past you or police sirens coming down the road, when they passed
you, they change pitch. In the same way, when Mars is approaching us, it
changes if you like, the pitch of the light and the light from methane
is shifted in wavelength to the blue of the terrestrial line. When Mars
is receding, it's shifted to the other direction, it gets shifted to the
red, so fortunately, at those wavelengths when the shift is large the
terrestrial transmission function is improved.

For example, in the case of the data we were talking about, the
transmittance of Mars is about 25% by the Earth's atmosphere on the
dates we observed. It helps if you go to a high altitude as well or if
you go to an airborne spectrometer, such as we hope to use on the SOFIA
instrument, an instrument called EXES when it comes online.

Anita Great. I want to be respectful of your time commitment here. Do
other people have some questions for Mike? Mike, you tell us when you
need to leave.

Mike I will have to leave in about 15 minutes, but we can go that far.

Michelle I have a question. This is Michelle \[Nichols\] with the Adler
Planetarium in Chicago. How soon could the Scout mission or the
telescope at the Lagrange point, how soon could those potentially fly?

Mike The typical time it takes to develop a flight mission of this type
is on the order of four to five years. In the case of the telescope at
L1, if we were to get authority to begin that in November or even in the
spring of '05, there could be an orbit in five years. In the case of the
Mars Scout, I think that the time scale is comparable, but I can't speak
for the principal investigator of that mission. He would have to answer
that question directly. It's just a very difficult thing to build
spacecraft, test them, and then launch them. There's a cruise phase as
well. You have to insert it into orbit and you have to check things out.
By the time you do all this in detail, four years from the beginning of
the project to actual orbit insertion would be an amazingly fast
development.

Anita Until then, you're going to have to rely on, hopefully, some
improved instrumentation and data reduction techniques.

Mike That's right. We'll begin a new campaign, an observing campaign
from ground-based observatories next fall and that will continue for
almost a year by which time the SOFIA observatory will be online and
we'll hope to make these observations from SOFIA. Although they will
help to fill in the gaps, they are not a substitute for a space mission
to Mars that gets us good spatial resolution and so forth.

By the way, I think everyone is aware of this, but it should be obvious
that if we succeed in pinning down these regions by Mars orbiting
spacecraft, then it's obvious that from then on you want to send a
lander to the most interesting places. And then once you've exhausted
what the lander can do or multiple landers, then ultimately, you'll want
to put humans on the surface to do in depth studies and bring things
back to Earth.

Anita So that's the science \-- if the humans are going to do science?

Mike That's the interesting question. It's very difficult. It's a
tremendously challenging task to put humans on Mars and bring them back
safely, far more difficult than going to the moon.

Anita Will Spitzer be able to help you at all?

Mike Spitzer really can't. It doesn't have high resolution spectroscopy
on board. Their highest spectral resolving power, as we call it, is 600
units and we need spectral resolving powers of 30,000 units. So what we
see as sharp spectral features, they would see as nothing. They would
not be able to detect them.

Anita Other questions for Mike?

Mike My, what a quiet group. Don't be bashful folks. I'm happy to answer
questions even if you think they're silly or too simple, please just go
ahead and ask them.

Anita One thing I wondered if you could talk about a little bit, I
looked at your Web site, but I don't think it's been updated lately. You
mentioned at DPS what your current title is and you're involved with the
astrobiology institute there at Ames.

Mike Yes, I'm actually Director of the Goddard Center for Astrobiology.
We won a major role last summer as a new team in the NASA Astrobiology
Institute, which is a distributed institute; sometimes it's called a
virtual institute. There are 16 teams that are spread around the country
and most are universities. There's one at JPL called the Planetary Lab
run by Vicki Meadows. Our group here is mainly concerned with the
delivery of organic material and water to the early Earth and to other
young planets. So we conduct observational studies of comets in great
detail, of Mars, we're searching for atmospheres and planets around
other stars, and an element that studies molecular material, gas phase
material in disks around stars where planets are currently forming.

Another group in our team does laboratory science to study the effect of
ultraviolet light and x-rays on ices and silicates in material and
protoplanetary disks to see what kinds of organic changes are produced
there; and of course, part of this is searching for complex organics in
places like Mars. A key part of our team, Dr. Paul Mahaffey and Will
Brinckerhoff, in particular, are developing flight instruments for
measuring complex organics on the surface of Mars and have proposed
certain investigations that would shed a lot of light on whether there
are organic compounds more complex than the simple hydrocarbons and
alcohols and so forth, in the soil of Mars. We actually have quite a
broad activity and this is a part of it, the work we're discussing
today.

Anita That's really exciting. I really appreciate you taking the time to
talk to us today.

Mike I'm happy to.

Anita Since it's Thanksgiving week, there could be fewer people online
and that's why we do the transcript.

Mike Sure.

Anita Because your results have not been published, I didn't opt for a
recording for future replay. We'll just get the transcript.

Mike Yes, we're working hard on that right now and we hope to have this
submitted shortly after our return from this observing run.

Anita Great, okay.

Mike There's a lot of work to do. Thank you very much for having me on
the program. It's been a delight.

Anita I really appreciate it.

Mike You're very welcome.

Anita Bye.

Mike Bye-bye.

Anita I don't know about you guys, but I thought that was fun.

Michelle That was really cool. It's definitely something once they are
able to publish and we can talk about it, it's something that I think
people will really latch onto. It's just the possibilities of what it
could be.

Anita Yes. I don't think there are any underground termite colonies.

W Or cows, an underground feed lot. You never know.

Anita You never know.

W That was really cool. Thank you for setting that up.

Anita I was just like a cat in a chicken coop, or whatever you want to
call it, at DPS, because there were so many interesting presentations
that I wanted to share with you guys, so I'm going to try to bit by bit
call these people and get them to talk to you guys.

M Anita, I've got an unrelated question if you're ready for one of
those.

Anita Absolutely.

M There's an image taken around the 9^th^ of March, I hate to bring this
back, this is ancient news probably, but it was a microscopic image or
picture from Opportunity and it showed the rotini. Do you remember
those?

Anita No.

M No, okay. I was wondering if anybody has actually ever gone back and
looked at that image again and made a final call, as to what could
explain them geologically.

Anita I don't know. Let me look into that.

M It was shown in one of the Mars mission briefings when they were doing
them every other day and then it you never heard about it again. And of
course, obviously the point I make to my audience is, we haven't heard
about it because they're still discovering new things and they're trying
to process what they've got and they're still trying to figure out where
they're going to go next. That's the point you make, there's all kinds
of good stuff being turned up that they're just not able to get to yet.
So it's extremely possible that no one has looked at it again.

Anita I'm sure somebody is up here. If I can figure out which team is
looking at that, I can call. \[Bob Anderson of the rover team reports
confirmation from the RAT team that the rotini is a cutting from the
Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT).\]

M There's another thing, too, Steve Squyres did a talk at NASA Ames and
so far, I've had no luck in getting the public affairs office at Ames to
return phone calls or whatever.

Anita Who are you calling?

M I wrote her name down when I called, but I don't have it in front of
me. I made a couple phone calls and inquiries about getting the footage
on VHS or DVD of his talk to the NASA Ames folks, because that was
really succinct 30 minutes or so of here's what we found on Mars. And it
really made a lot more sense than the bits and pieces, it put it all
together into a big picture. That might be really good for snippets of
that to be entered into something for the planetarium community.

Anita Okay, let me see what they're doing on that. I can --

M Okay. That would be really great.

Anita I had Steve Squyres -- he had my business card with the number to
call in, he was going to do this two weeks ago at DPS, but then he
decided that he was just so stretched. He said, "I will do it sometime"
and in fact, then Kay Ferrari who most of you know works with the
Ambassador program, she was here last week when we had a AAS \[American
Astronomical Society\] meeting in Pasadena, he was there and she
cornered him and he promised to do a telecon for the Ambassadors and
museums.

M Really?

Anita She was hoping to get it in the first part of December.

M It sounds good to me. Okay. Alright.

Anita We're working on these guys.

M Thank you very much for everything again and I'm going to go ahead and
sign off.

Anita Does anybody else on the line have anything they want to discuss?

W No. Everything is okay on my end.

Anita That's all for today then.

W Great.

M Alright, thank you.

Anita Thank you.

W Bye-bye.