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Viking Mars Mission Might Have Missed Life
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."
I think thie idea is: They sent Viking to Mars. It had this experiment on it to detect organic molecules. It all came back negative. They thought that meant there might be an oxidant that's actively destroying organic molecules, but these guys say that maybe the experiment was just broken.
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Notice that this article was published in 2000. It doesn't say that the equipment was "broken"; it merely points out that there exist chemical pathways that would result in relatively stable organic compounds that wouldn't have been detected by the Viking equipment. The next mission can look for traces of these compounds specifically, now that someone has pointed out that there is a mechanism for their creation.
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.
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.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
barring some bizarre deep-rock extremophiles.
You mean like these, 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.
Quoth the Wiki:
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As a biochemist, you value experimental data. Many common earthly micro-organisms can survive under Martian conditions. Scientists have put samples of soil in containers called "Mars jars", where the atmospheric temperature, composition, pressure and dryness are close to those of Mars. Some of the micro-organisms in the samples always survive.
Consider the dry valleys in Antarctica, nearly as harsh except for the radiation, which you can avoid by living a few centimeters down.
- There are bacteria that actually make use of radiation to provide the energy.
- No atmosphere you say; First off, there is an atmosphere there; It is mostly CO2. Anaerobe anyone?
- No water on Mars? You have to be kidding. It is known that there is plenty of water. But on the surface, It is in the form of ice.
- And again there are bacteria that withstand these compounds (few, but they exist).
Finally, all of these issues are on the surface. Think about caves.I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
"they seem just about perfectly suited to the environment on Mars... They don't need an atmosphere, they depend on radiation,"
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).
A couple reasons:
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).
An unmanned probe to Mars, if designed well, can last for more than a couple of weeks or months once it reaches Mars. The Opportunity rover has been sending data back for about two years now. The Mars Global Surveyor satellite has been sending data back for more than 8 years. The huge amounts of data obtained by these missions will probably keep scientists busy for a few years after the spacecraft or rovers themselves no longer function. The cost of these unmanned missions is very small compared to what President Bush wants the U.S. to spend over the next decade to send humans to Mars for a short, risky mission that will probably have very little scientific return.
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.