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A scientist recently claim thatNASAmay have unwittingly discovered life onMarsalmost 50 years ago and then incidentally killed it before realizing what it was . But other experts are burst on whether the new claim are a far - fetched fantasy or an challenging possible account for some baffle past experimentation .
After landing on the Red Planet in 1976 , NASA ’s Viking landers may have sample tiny , dry - resistant life - form concealment inside Martian rocks , Dirk Schulze - Makuch , an astrobiologist at Technical University Berlin , suggest in a June 27 article forBig Think .
A controversial claim suggest that there may be living microbes just below the surface of Mars, which have gone undetected because they were killed in previous experiments.
If these uttermost life - form did and continue to exist , the experimentation carry out by the Lander may have drink down them before they were identified , because the exam would have " overwhelmed these possible microbe , " Schulze - Makuch wrote .
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This is " a suggestion that some the great unwashed surely will find provocative , " Schulze - Makuch state . But similar microbes do inhabit on Earth and could hypothetically subsist on the Red Planet , so they ca n’t be discounted , he added .
A model replica of one of the Viking landers.
Viking experiments
Each of the Viking Lander — Viking 1 and Viking 2 — carried out four experimentation on Mars : the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer ( GCMS ) experiment , which looked for organic , or carbon - contain , chemical compound in Martian soil ; the label liberation experimentation , which prove for metamorphosis by add up radioactively trace nutrients to the filth ; the pyrolytic loss experimentation , which prove for carbon fixation by possible photosynthetic being ; and the gasoline interchange experiment , which test for metabolic process by monitoring how gases that are known to be key to life ( such as oxygen , carbon dioxide and nitrogen ) change surrounding stray soil sampling .
The result of the Viking experiments were puzzling , and have continued to perplex some scientists ever since . The labeled dismissal and pyrolytic sack experiment bring forth some final result that supported the idea oflife on Mars : In both experiments , small changes in the concentration of some gases hinted that some kind of metamorphosis was taking place .
The GCMS also found some traces of chlorinated organic compounds , but at the sentence , mission scientists believed the compounds were pollution from cleaning production used on Earth . ( Subsequent landers and scouter have since proved that these constituent compoundsoccur naturally on Mars . )
The Atacama Desert is home to extreme microbes that require almost no water to survive.
However , the gaseous state exchange experiment , which was deemed the most significant of the four , produced a negative result , direct most scientists to eventually conclude that the Viking experiment did not detect Martian life .
But Schulze - Makuch believes most of the experiments may have bring forth skew results because they used too much water . ( The tag release , pyrolytic release and gas exchange experiment all tangled adding weewee to the soil . )
Too much of a good thing
" Since Earth is a water satellite , it seemed reasonable that add water might coax life history to show itself in the passing dry Martian environment , " Schulze - Makuch write . " In hindsight , it is potential that overture was too much of a expert affair . "
In very dry Earth environments , such as theAtacama Desertin Chile , there are extreme microbes that can thrive by obliterate in hygroscopic rocks , which are extremely salty and draw in lilliputian amounts of pee from the air besiege them . These rocks are present on Mars , which does have some layer of humidity that could hypothetically sustain such microbes . If these microbes also contained H hydrogen peroxide , a chemical that is compatible with some life story - forms on Earth , it would aid them to further pull in wet and also may have produced some of the gases observe in the labeled passing experiment , Schulze - Makuch proposed .
Related : Is there water on Mars ?
A microscope image of a bacteria in the genusAcinetobacter. Extreme, dry-tolerant strains of these microbes are found in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
But too much water system can be virulent to these tiny organisms . In a 2018 study publish in the journalScientific Reports , researchers found that extreme floods in the Atacama Desert had killed up to 85 % of autochthonic bug that could not adapt to wetter weather condition .
Therefore , adding water to any potential bug in the Viking dirt samples may have been equivalent to stranding humans in the midriff of an ocean : Both need water system to hold up , but in the wrong compactness , it can be baneful to them , Schulze - Makuch wrote .
Alberto Fairén , an astrobiologist at Cornell University and co - author of the 2018 study , told Live Science in an email that he " altogether agrees " that bestow water to the Viking experiments could have killed possible hygroscopic microbes and given upgrade to Viking ’s contradictory results .
Controversial claim
This is not the first time that scientists have propose that the Viking experiments may have unknowingly drink down Martian microbes . In 2018 , another radical of researcher proposed that when soil samples were heated up , an unexpected chemical reaction could haveburned and killed any bug live in the samples . This group exact that this could also explain some of the puzzling results from the experiments .
However , other scientists conceive the Viking results are far less equivocal than Schulze - Makuch and others make them out to be . In 2007 , NASA ’s Phoenix lander , the replacement to the Viking landers , retrieve traces of perchlorate — a chemical substance that ’s used in fireworks , road flair and explosives , and of course occurs inside some rocks — on Mars .
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The world-wide scientific consensus is that the presence of perchlorate and its byproducts can adequately explain the gases observe in the original Viking results , which has fundamentally " resolved the Viking dilemma,“Chris McKay , an astrobiologist at NASA ’s Ames Research Center in California , told Live Science in an email .
As a consequence , scientist who continue to chip by at the Lander ' results are wasting their exploit , McKay add . " I disagree with their logic , " he read . " There is no need to invoke a strange new type of life to explain the Viking results . "
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