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NASA May Have Discovered and Then Destroyed Organics on Mars in 1976 (space.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Over 40 years ago, a NASA mission may have accidentally destroyed what would have been the first discovery of organic molecules on Mars, according to a report from New Scientist. Recently, NASA caused quite a commotion when it announced that its Curiosity rover discovered organic molecules -- which make up life as we know it -- on Mars. This followed the first confirmation of organic molecules on Mars in 2014. But because small, carbon-rich meteorites so frequently pelt the Red Planet, scientists have suspected for decades that organics exist on Mars.
But researchers were stunned in 1976, when NASA sent two Viking landers to Mars to search for organics for the first time and found absolutely none. Scientists didn't know what to make of the Viking findings -- how could there be no organics on Mars? "It was just completely unexpected and inconsistent with what we knew," Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, told New Scientist.
But researchers were stunned in 1976, when NASA sent two Viking landers to Mars to search for organics for the first time and found absolutely none. Scientists didn't know what to make of the Viking findings -- how could there be no organics on Mars? "It was just completely unexpected and inconsistent with what we knew," Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, told New Scientist.
Use Google translate: English to English.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Kind suggestion for Slashdot editors: please mention how the organics were destroyed in the lede. You say they were destroyed but you don't say how.
Kriston
I had to double check to see if that was Rodney. It wasn't.
Couldn't the organics have ridden the 1976 Viking landers to be discovered in 2014? So they would have effectively moved the organics from Earth to Mars as part of the 1976 missions, to be surprised by their presence in 2014.
This is a pretty terrible article summary and the headline is absurdly hyperbolic. The original design of the Viking experiments was always going to, quite intentionally *destroyed" organic molecules, and in fact, any actual life that existed, at some point. The fact that perchlorates were later discovered, completely unexpectedly, was a wild card that absolutely no one predicted at the time, nor was it a reasonable thing to have imagined.
The headline sounds like it was written by a 12-year-old, "nasa FAILZ, LOL!"
Absolute garbage, even reading the /. blurb is insulting.
They were destroyed by the clickbait headline.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
IMHO, Perchlorate didn't need the gas chromatograph to digest organic molecules, lightning has been detected on mars, so that alone would be enough.
If that was why there was no organics due to perchlorate, then there was no organics before the mars lander heated it up. *Heat* wasn't the missing ingredient.
There's iron in blood, and there's iron in rust. That's part of life as we know it. No one got excited about that.
Big deal. They found atoms are part of the same table of the elements everywhere?
So what?
Mostly random stuff.
I tried that, but what came back was horribly twisted to something incomprehensible.
NASA blinded themselves with Science!
Rick B.
So you're saying nothing changed?
Dr. Gilbert V. Levin's "Labeled Release (LR)" experiment on the Viking had positive results. He has published in peer reviewed journals analysis on why the results indicate life. He was interviewed on The Space Show last year
Seriously, what was NASA thinking? You don't send two Vikings somewhere and expect them to not kill and plunder. Since there's nothing to plunder on Mars, it kind of narrows their options for things to do.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
At 2300 degrees, steel becomes liquid. At 1500 degrees, structural steel is about the consistency (and strength) of plastic. You can try it yourself. You can get a 1/4 steel rod and propane torch at home depot. Get it the steel glowing bright red (1500) and you'll find you can easily bend it with finger pressure.
https://youtu.be/FzF1KySHmUA
...they thought they had discovered evidence of actual life...not just organics.
NASA had three separate experiment modules on the Viking lander. One of them was a labelled release (LR) experiment that worked by collecting Martian soil and adding a drop of liquid water that contained nutrients and radioactive carbon atoms. The experiment was that if the soil contained microbes those microbes would metabolize the water with nutrients and release either radioactive carbon dioxide or methane gas which would be detected by a radiation detector on the experiment module...and voila, you have proof of living organisms. This was one of the three experiments and the science standard for the mission was to crosscheck results of each experiment with the others.
The LR experiment came back strongly positive and, at the time, made the news as "possible life on Mars" only to be dialed back as a false positive because the other two experiments came back negative.
But this is all old news. National Geographic did a story on this several years back (edit: 2012). As I wrote this I Googled and found it here: https://news.nationalgeographi...
I was 10 at the time the Viking lander arrived at Mars and wanted to be an Astronaut so this stuff was very much on my radar back then. I recall the news that they found life on Mars as being quite exciting for 2 or 3 days until they retracted the claim.
Social Media Handywoman at Texas Boys Balloo
This came out years ago. It was already known there was a flaw in the Viking's instruments that over heated the samples and burned out any evidence.
There have been a lot of stories coming out of NASA and JPL of people actively altering and suppressing images and data from mars to support the long-held beliefs of the "Red Planet", including tweaking the colours of images to make them more red, including the sky, and airbrushing out objects that belie those beliefs. That NASA destroyed evidence of life found on a planet they've long ago decided had never had any life at all is unsurprising. (It's actually old news.)
"Accidentally"? Accidentally on purpose.
The old defenders of scientific reality are mostly gone and have little, if any, influence now, fortunately. But the paradigm still isn't dying. Yet.
does not prove anything...el stupido
nothing to see here - move along
NASA = Never a Straight Answer. Never, ever, ever believe these guys about anything. NASA are pathological psychopathic liars. The kind that look you directly in the eye while smiling.
If NASA's lips are moving, it means they are lying.
There were 23 changes to building codes based on lessons learned from 9-11.
https://www.buildings.com/arti...
https://www.fireengineering.co...
Smells like...bullshit science. This is a hope to write a paper and pull interest based ona completely unfounded idea or suspicion.
Thanks for asking. There are a couple of important effects at play, some of which you can try yourself at home, or may have already seen.
You may have seen an aluminum can or glass bottle melt in a campfire or bonfire. Glass melts at about 2,700F. A wood fire can reach temperatures of 3,590F, especially with a structure providing vertical airflow. About 2,000F is more typical for a campfire, but I've seen glass melt in a wood fire and you may have as well. Iron catches on fire, not just burns, at about 1500, and produces rather hot flame (think lighting 4th of July sparklers - they are made of iron).
So there are a lot of things in a building that can burn, and some of them burn quite hot. The elevator and utilities shafts turn the building into a VERY large blast furnace.
Here are a couple things you can definitely try at home. Go to the garage and get your standard 1 pound hammer. Find a chunk of brick or concrete and bring it to a shaded area, or do this in the evening so you can see sparks. Smash the brick or concrete with your 1 pound hammer a few times and notice you get some sparks. Notice the color. Yellow. If we look it up, we see that yellow corresponds to 1100C, or 2012F. You just made 2,000 degrees with your 1 pound hammer. Now imagine a 5 million pound hammer. That's the weight falling at WTC - 5 million pounds. If a 1 pound hammer generates 2,000 degrees, a 5 million pound hammer generates - really fucking hot.
I forgot something. You may know steel is mostly iron.
You may know that 2,00-3,000 years ago people were smelting (and melting) iron.
You may not know they were making steel in China over 2,000 years ago. Molten steel. Do you think they used C4 in China 2,000 years ago. Of course not. Melting steel just isn't all that hard to do. Especially if you don't mind destroying the container it's in. I've melted various metals to liquid and my problem has always been breaking the container. The melting itself isn't too hard.
Btw sometimes I make fireworks. In fireworks, the bright colors you see are metals on fire. Orange-yellow is iron, green is copper, magnesium burns bright white, etc. Fireworks are lit with a match, how do they burn all of these metals?
It happens that things which catch fire at fairly low temperatures (such as jet fuel) tend to give a fairly low temperature flame. Things that light at higher temperatures (such as iron) give a higher temperature flame. So to get magnesium to burn, I combine something that catches fire from a match with something else that catches fire at a higher temp, but burns hotter. It's stages.
Stage 1 lights easily, and produces 750 degrees. Stage 2 lights at 700 degrees and produces a flame of 1200 degrees. That 1200 degrees can light magnesium, which produces a 4000 degree flame. By having two other materials present, a match can light a fire that burns metals and produces 4000 degrees.
As it happens, a large office building contains many different kinds of materials. Some light easily, some burn at several thousand degrees Fahrenheit.
There are different kinds of steel used today, compared to China 2k years ago.