One researcher hypothesizes that experiments carried out by NASA's Viking landers in 1976 could have inadvertently killed microbes living in Martian rocks. Other experts are skeptical.
A scientist recently claimed that NASA may have inadvertently discovered life on Mars almost 50 years ago and then accidentally killed it before realizing what it was. But other experts are split on whether the new claims are a far-fetched fantasy or an intriguing possible explanation for some puzzling past experiments.
Viking experimentsEach of the Viking landers — Viking 1 and Viking 2 — carried out four experiments on Mars: the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer experiment, which looked for organic, or carbon-containing, compounds in Martian soil; the labeled release experiment, which tested for metabolism by adding radioactively traced nutrients to the soil; the pyrolytic release experiment, which tested for carbon fixation by potential photosynthetic organisms; and the gas exchange experiment, which...
However, the gas exchange experiment, which was deemed the most important of the four, produced a negative result, leading most scientists to eventually conclude that the Viking experiments did not detect Martian life. In very dry Earth environments, such as the Atacama Desert in Chile, there are extreme microbes that can thrive by hiding in hygroscopic rocks, which are extremely salty and draw in tiny amounts of water from the air surrounding them. These rocks are present on Mars, which does have some level of humidity that could hypothetically sustain such microbes.
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