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New Study Suggests Mars Viking Robots Found Life
techfun89 writes "New analysis of data, now 36 years old, from the Viking robots, suggests that NASA had found life on Mars. This conclusion was published by an international team of mathematicians and scientists this week. The Labeled Release experiment looked for signs of microbial metabolism in soil samples in 1976. The general thinking was that the experiment had found geological not biological activity. However, the new study approached things differently. Researchers broke the data into sets of numbers and analyzed the results for complexity. What they found were close correlations between the Viking results' complexity and those of terrestrial biological data sets. Based on this they concluded that the Viking results were more biological in nature than just geological processes."
Time to invoke the prime directive and leave it alone.
Seriously, if this were true, it means we should restrict visits to Mars. Not only to have a chance to study evolving life over the next aeons, but also so we won't drag back something.
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Paper is available for open access here: http://ijass.org/On_line/admin/files/2)(014-026)11-030.pdf
Haven't read it yet, but they seem to have analysed with multiple definitions of complexity.
A little bit of googling led me to a PDF of the full published paper if anyone's interested.
My work here is dung.
LMGTFY: http://www.space.com/7775-strange-mars-photo-includes-tantalizing-tree-illusion.html
Complexity Analysis of the Viking Labeled Release Experiments
Giorgio Bianciardi, Joseph D. Miller, Patricia Ann Straat and Gilbert V. Levin
The only extraterrestrial life detection experiments ever conducted were the three which were components of the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars. Of these, only the Labeled Release experiment obtained a clearly positive response. In this experiment 14 C radiolabeled nutrient was added to the Mars soil samples. Active soils exhibited rapid, substantial gas release. The gas was probably CO2 and, possibly, other radiocarbon-containing gases. We have applied complexity analysis to the Viking LR data. Measures of mathematical complexity permit deep analysis of data structure along continua including signal vs. noise, entropy vs.negentropy, periodicity vs. aperiodicity, order vs. disorder etc. We have employed seven complexity variables, all derived from LR data, to show that Viking LR active responses can be distinguished from controls via cluster analysis and other multivariate techniques. Furthermore, Martian LR active response data cluster with known biological time series while the control data cluster with purely physical measures. We conclude that the complexity pattern seen in active experiments strongly suggests biology while the different pattern in the control responses is more likely to be non-biological. Control responses that exhibit relatively low initial order rapidly devolve into near-random noise, while the active experiments exhibit higher initial order which decays only slowly. This suggests a robust biological response. These analyses support the interpretation that the Viking LR experiment did detect extant microbial life on Mars.
"In mathematical terms, the Euclidean distance between the centroids of the two clusters was significantly larger than the intra-cluster distances between any members of either cluster." Any English major could tell you what kind of cluster that sentence is!
This sentence makes perfect sense. They were a little redundant when saying "intra-cluster distances between any members of either cluster", where they could have just said "intra-cluster distances".
The sentence is fine, and makes perfect sense if you know what cluster analysis is. An English major, furthermore, would perhaps have used "detecting life" and some proper ellipses instead of "detecting live". :P
Not to argue the science involved, but wouldn't the act of heating the soil to sterilize it effectively change the chemistry, too? For instance, if the soil contained frozen gases or water, those could have reacted in the "biological tests" but, once heated, they would not be present in the control tests. In the 70s it was thought that there wasn't water on mars, so would the tests have been designed to account for water?
It was indeed the argument, after the fact, that the unknown surface chemistry was changed by heat.
It is a mistake to think that in the '70s it was thought that there was no water on Mars. By the time of Viking, with Valles Marineris and other channels, it seemed likely that there was a substantial amount, at least in the past. Also, there was even overnight "snow" (frost, really) at the Viking 2 site, and IIRC they concluded that that was likely water. The biological tests included "wet" and "dry" experiments, as some thought that water might be poisonous to any surface life used to its absence.
On Mars, the air is very thin, so the surface can be at +20 C, while 1 meter up a thermometer registers -20 C. The Viking met data always recorded very cold temperatures, but orbiter IR data indicated that the surface at the landers actually did get above freezing during the day. The Viking 1 and 2 surface pressure was above the triple point of water, at least some of the time, so liquid water would be stable on the surface, at least on a warm afternoon in the right time of year.
Been done (many times, in fact), and the results are inconclusive. We don't really know what's in the soil, so it's hard to be certain that results which mimic (or not) the Viking results are actually due to chemistry on Mars, or wishful thinking on Earth.
By the way, perchlorates may have destroyed any organics in the soil in the heating required to analyze it in the Viking mass spectrometer, so some think that the perchlorates are a reason to rethink the earlier negative conclusions.
No it does not have this, and I don't think one will fly until there is firmer evidence for microbial life. However it has a vastly imporved micro imager...in color no less. The test pictures from it are pretty spectacular (compared to Opportunity's): http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-384#4