LOL!
There is new life in old data…and it's likely Martian life.
Several scientists have found compelling evidence that Viking Mars landers did indeed discover life on the red planet in 1976. A re-examination of findings relayed to Earth by the probes some 25 years ago, claim the experts, show the tell-tale signs of microbes lurking within the Martian soil.
The researchers will unveil their views Sunday, July 29, at a session on astrobiology, held during the SPIE's 46th annual International Society for Optical Engineering meeting in San Diego, California.
Slam dunk discovery
When the Viking 1 and Viking 2 Landers dropped in on Mars that July and September of 1976, respectively, each carried the same set of biological experiments to search for signs of life.
But over a quarter of a century later, exactly what the robotic twosome did detect remains hotly debated.
Images
A model of the Mars Viking Lander 1
The TRW-built Mars viking biology experiment was prepared in a clean room. The equivalent of a university biology lab, it contained more than 40,000 components crammed into a space no larger than a car battery. Both Viking landers carried these devices. CREDIT: TRW Space & Electronics
The first picture taken on the surface of Mars. Viking's camera began scanning the scene 25 seconds after touchdown and continued to scan for five minutes. The picture was assembled from left to right during the 20 minutes it took to transmit the data from the Orbiter relay station to Earth.
A Viking 1 Lander image of Mars' Chryse Planitia. The large white object at lower left and center, with the American flag on the side, is the spacecraft's radiothermal generator (RTG) cover. The shot is looking to the northwest of the lander.
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The scientific squabble centers on one Viking biology investigation: the Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment. It used a small measure of scooped up soil, stirred together with a nutrient "soup" containing carbon-14.
The idea was that any living organisms present would digest the radioactively labeled nutrient solution, then belch off gases as life metabolized the nutrient. And guess what? The LR experiments on both Landers coughed up puffs of radiolabeled gas - evidence for microorganisms in the soil of Mars.
But it was no slam-dunk of a discovery.
Sterile Mars
Another Viking experiment, a gas chromatograph mass-spectrometer (GCMS), built to identify organic molecules on Mars, found none to analyze.
That find threw the LR results into question. A default position adopted by a majority of scientists was that no life was present at the Viking sites. What the LR device yielded, said many of those assessing the Viking data, was a false positive result.
Cause of the result, and still widely held: A chemical practical joker is in the soil, some sort of oxidant that fooled the LR experiment.
Over the years, that verdict has been touted by many as the most likely rationale for the LR results. Moreover, that oxidant is nasty to life. It destroys organic materials, causing the surface of Mars to be a sterile, lifeless domain. Therefore, no wonder the GCMS found Mars absent of organic materials.
This tidy explanation has served well to derail talk that the Viking Landers detected life.
Clinging to the magnets
But a staunch believer that Viking found life is Gilbert Levin, former Viking scientist and now chief executive officer for Spherix in Beltsville, Maryland. His Labeled Release experiment, he told SPACE.com, worked like a charm and gave notice that life was observed
"The Viking LR experiment detected living microorganisms in the soil of Mars," Levin flatly said.
Also believing that a biological interpretation of the LR on Mars cannot be dismissed is David Warmflash, an astrobiologist at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.