Slashdot Mirror
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."
Ask anyone who was around in 1976, they probably wouldn't count that year as the time of their life in which they were the most lucid and observant of their surroundings.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Is this about non-working equipement or harsh environment capable of destroying organic molecules before they can be detected?
It seems a little silly to base 2006 missions on results from a 30 year old set of space technology. Sure, we were in our heyday of space exploration during the 70's, but our analytical equipment was light years behind where we are now. The largest computes had fractions of the computing power of today's Blackberry's, and we couldn't transmit data faster than ~300 bps back then. Both of these limitations (which don't exist today), would seriously impede the ability to detect signs of life.
Rather than try to deduce why the analyses of 1976 didn't show signs of organic compounds on the surface, why not just perform better tests now with the next Mars mission?
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
That's just what they want us to think.
...barring some bizarre deep-rock extremophiles.
1. Hard radiation on surface - not good.
2. Virtually zero atmosphere - not that good.
3. No (or little water) - not good.
4. Highly oxidising compounds on surface - very bad.
Each in themselves, not a show-stopper. Two - err... All of them == no life. Well, not as we know it (Jim - sorry).
As a biochemist, I wouldn't expect any form of life (AWKI) to survive those conditions; not even if I were allowed to tweak every other possible variable to the organism's advantage. It would be nice to be proved wrong - but I don't think so.
Mars missions are still extremely expensive, and there's a lot of wisdom behind analyzing past mistakes to make sure they don't happen again in future missions.
The optimism of life-seekers on Mars does not suprise me any longer. Just about every person I have heard quoted believes that either there is life on Mars, or there was in the past. The only dissent I've heard was from James Lovelock, who predicted _before_ the Viking missions that no life would be found on Mars, based on its infrared signature from space. Simply put, he said that on the one planet we know life exists, it has completely transformed our environment to such a degree that would be completely impossible (from the amount of unstable gases in our atmosphere, among other things) for an alien observer to miss it. If there was life on Mars, why has it been so utterly passive and gentle to its environment compared to life on earth?
I'm still convinced by that. I don't think life could have existed on Mars today without transforming its environment, and I don't think it could have existed in the past without leaving huge traces - and it would be very unlikely that it should die out, too. Life as we know it just doesn't behave like that.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Wrong. The Viking mission detected microbial life. I was a 12 year old paper boy at the time. I remember, this made front page headline news. The Viking mission detected microbial life. The following day it was retracted. I kind of believed that the retraction was false. I always did. Perhaps manipulation from the right wing of our government thinking that we were not ready for the information. hey , if microbes can survive deep in the permafrost in the Antartic, then hey, microbes can survive on mars
deep in the martian soil.
As far as advanced life, well think about how many stars there are, followed by how many solar systems, and the expanse of the universe, heck... an alien life form may be so far out there that we'd never make contact, but heck, it's possible that there's life
out there.
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.
At least when Martians launch missions to Earth, they have the courtesy to say "Hi". Even if it's with a million-degree super-laser.
...is of course, still, that there simply is no life on Mars (except for the micro-organisms we brought there from Earth). Just because the equipment failed to detect it, doesn't mean it has to exist. That's like saying "I've never seen a yellow-dotted purple kangaroo, but I may have been looking in the wrong direction so they probably exist."
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
with apologies to Father Guido Sarducci...
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
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.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I still vividly remember watching the BBC 'April Fool' documentary 'Alternative 3' in the 70's which scared the hell out of me. For those that never heard of it, it was a documentry about the various scientists that were going missing at the time (for real, in the UK) and claimed they had found out the Earth was dying and the governments of the world had drawn up 3 solutions. 1 & 2 were something like reducing population growth, killing excess/useless members of the population etc. but 3 was to go to Mars, seed the atmosphere and start to collonise it. They had a thread running through of an encrypted video tape they'd been given. When they managed to get a decoder it showed a clip taken by Voyager of the now familiar rock strewn red surface but as the camera panned, the soil started to move and something was clearly alive there and burrowing about under the surface. The point being Mars wasn't as dead as we first thought.
Oh, and the 'missing' scientists were all on Mars working on the terraforming.
Trouble was, it was supposed to be an April fool joke but got showed about a week later causing Orson Wells/War of the Worlds chaos for a few days until the BBC issued a release saying it was all a joke. A book came out about ten years later saying it was all real and the BBC had been forced to cover it up.
To be clear, it was a spoof - it had lots of people in it who are now well known actors but at the time were unknowns.
Alas, apart from a few very grainy clips, it has never been reshown and is almost impossible to find.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Never send a Viking to do a Norseman's job.
Which doesn't mean "it missed something!" Viking might have "missed something" and yet there still might not be life. It just means it isn't very conclusive so we should go back and look again.
One thing that I continually like to point out is that "life" at a basic level is agressively replicant. If there is any life that is a little successful, it explodes and tries to fill every nook and cranny and does it as fast as it can. If there is life anywhere on Mars it should be easy to find if we take a wide survey testing multiple places at multiple times of the Martian year. Just two tests isn't sufficient to call it either way.
- 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.
Yep, we had neo-cons clear back then. Yeah, I remember that when it occured. It occasionally makes it into google as well. The original inventor of the idea backed off because a different route was found that could invalidate the test (it was generation of various gases that were measured via gas chromatograph as I recall. Since then every test that we have done that checks for possible life comes back positive, but we always figure inorganic chemistries that can get around these.
I guess that until we go there and test it directly, we will not know. May not know then either.
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.
If biological molecules are available they can facultatively use them for growth as in the case of Levine's Labelled Release experiment. This means that there could be very low levels of organic material in the Martian soil yet living potentially active micro-organisms could be present. This would explain the negative result found by the Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry experiment.
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).
If we were to wait for all the "problems" on Earth, all the discoveries of "genuine value" on Earth to be figured out before looking up, we'd be a nation of lawyers, accountants and middle managers.
we can multitask! We can kill & explore & educate & entertain all at the same time. The $400 million or whatever spent on a single unmanned probe is money well spent; not cheap, but not out of scale with any number of public or private projects. If we must, lets sacrifice 3 summer blockbusters each year and funnel the money "saved" to pay for the missions.
:: the general public is as disinterested in advanced art as ever
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.
it could simply be that there is no life on Mars.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Organic means literally "compounds containing but not limited to Carbon and Hydrogen". Most of the comments here seem to be focussing on the "life" aspect here - Which is not what this science experiment (AFAIK) was about.