Viking Mars Mission Might Have Missed Life 136
Johan Louwers writes "The Viking mars mission in 1976 might have missed signs of life due to not completely working analysis equipment. GC-MS on the Viking 1976 Mars missions did not detect organic molecules on the Martian surface, even those expected from meteorite bombardment. This result suggested that the Martian regolith might hold a potent oxidant that converts all organic molecules to carbon dioxide rapidly relative to the rate at which they arrive. This conclusion is influencing the design of Mars missions. We reexamine this conclusion in light of what is known about the oxidation of organic compounds generally and the nature of organics likely to come to Mars via meteorite."
Re:I dont understant the story (Score:5, Informative)
This is sort of old (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I dont understant the story (Score:5, Informative)
The big summary of the article is this:
It's not due to the fact that the experiment was broken. It's just the way it was designed.
Re:when I was a paper boy I read.. Life found on M (Score:3, Informative)
As TFA explains:
TFA then considers the chemistry at the Martian surface and argues that the GC-MS experiement was misdesigned. I am not a chemist and can't speak to the strength of their argument.
Re:In short - no life on Mars. (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like these [slashdot.org], recently discovered in a South African gold mine?
Except for the water part (which Mars may well have underground), they seem just about perfectly suited to the environment on Mars... They don't need an atmosphere, they depend on radiation, and they have a sulfur-based metabolism rather than using oxygen.
Sounds like a good match... We should look for something like those, rather than trying to find types of organisms that, as you point out, have a very, very low chance of surviving on Mars.
Re:Alternative 3 (Score:4, Informative)
Quoth the Wiki:
Watch the entire show @ http://www.thule.org/brains/aroundtheconspiracy.ht ml [thule.org]
Re:In short - no life on Mars. (Score:3, Informative)
Consider the dry valleys in Antarctica, nearly as harsh except for the radiation, which you can avoid by living a few centimeters down.
And yet you have it incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
The Viking Mission Did Find Life on Mars (Score:5, Informative)
Klaus Biemann was a famous and respected chemist and mass-spectrometrist who had done much of the original work in developing GC-MS, While Gilbert Levine was a relative unknown who had run a start company that sold environmental testing equipment based on the LR technology Levine had invented. Bieman to it as an affront to himself the chemists and mass spectrometry as a technique that a biology experiment could detect life when his chemistry experiment could not. So he took it upon himself to launch an unremitting campaign to prove that the LR results were a false positive. The claimed to have proved this to be so but this was specious as no one had proposed a chemical model that would reproduce the Martian LR results in the laboratory.
Meanwhile experimental tests helped show the reliability of the LR experiments. Samples of Lunar rock from the Apollo missions tested negative, while Antarctic ice cores, which had been shown to contain micro-organisms at a very low level, gave positive results. However Biemann and other chemists, together with those that just simply refused to believe life on Mars is possible, had more or less silenced the debate.
I write this as a chemist who had just started work on GC-MS (and to me Biemann was something of a hero) at the time of the Viking landings (yes I am ancient). However I am convinced now after looking at the evidence that there is a strong case to argue that the LR experiments on the Viking landers provided strong evidence for the presence of microbial life in Martian soil.
Re:In short - no life on Mars. (Score:3, Informative)
Which wouldn't help them on Mars. Unlike Earth which has an abundance of radioactive materials, Mars has virtually none that we know of. AFAIK, it's part of the reason that the planet is dead (tectonically, that is).
Re:We haven't found life, why don't we seed life? (Score:3, Informative)
1.) There might really be life there that we're missing. If we "seed" Mars, we taint any future observations. We might even end up overwhelming it (eg, non-native invasive species).
2.) What do you send? As others have noted, the environment on Mars is extremely hostile to life as we know it. We could spend half a billion dollars sending a capsule with some fancy extremophiles there only to have them all die.
3.) Assuming they survive, in a radically different environment, they may no longer be helpful. Instead of photosynthesizing CO2 for O2, for instance, they may decide they'd rather lie dormant until disturbed by a human host, turning him into a evil zombie that can only be stopped from spreading by wiping out all intelligent life from the galaxy (btw, mod +1: Halo reference).
Your question has been asked before. In fact, NASA has an oversight person titled the "Planetary Protection Officer" whose job is to ensure that probes which we send to Mars and other planets are as free from bacteria and spores as possible, and for sample returns like from the Moon or Stardust mission, make sure there is no threat of some unexpected, unstoppable contamination that might kill us all (or even just millions of people).
Lifetimes of unmanned Mars probes (Score:2, Informative)
If we focused on sending unmanned probes to Mars and the other planets, the U.S. government could probably afford to fund both the unmanned spacecraft missions and biologists studying extremophiles in hostile environments here on Earth. The President's Vision for Space Exploration has had a terrible effect on NASA science fuding, as well as science funding for other governement agencies as well.