Astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, from the Technische Universität Berlin in Germany, believes that people could have unintentionally killed life on Mars within the Seventies.
NASA’s Viking 1 mission in 1976 noticed two spacecraft land on the Crimson Planet’s floor and conduct an experiment involving mixing water and vitamins with collected soil samples. The idea on the time was that life on Mars would behave the identical approach because it does on Earth, counting on liquid water to outlive.
As House.com studies, early outcomes gave researchers a tantalizing trace at the potential of life on the Crimson Planet — however regardless of many years of debate, they’ve since largely concluded that their readings had been a false optimistic.
Schulze-Makuch, nevertheless, takes this thorny debate one step additional, suggesting that the Viking landers could have certainly discovered life on Mars — however unintentionally killed it with its water-based life-hunting experiments.
That is as a result of he argues life on Mars could also be counting on salt deposits, very like the organisms that stay within the driest locations on Earth, such because the microbes habitating the Atacama Desert in Chile.
“In hyperarid environments, life can get hold of water by way of salts that draw moisture from the environment,” Schulze-Makuch wrote in a commentary for the journal Nature. “These salts, then, ought to be a spotlight of searches for all times on Mars.”
“The experiments carried out by NASA’s Viking landers could have unintentionally killed Martian life by making use of an excessive amount of water,” he added.
The astrobiologist’s speculation rebuffs the idea that NASA scientists made within the Seventies that life wants liquid water to outlive.
“If these inferences about organisms surviving in hyperarid Martian circumstances are appropriate, then quite than ‘comply with the water,’ which has lengthy been NASA’s technique in trying to find life on the Crimson Planet, we should always as well as comply with hydrated and hygroscopic compounds — salts — as a option to find microbial life,” Schulze-Makuch wrote.
In an interview with House.com, the researcher instructed that the concept of utilizing desk salt to create a brine, during which “sure micro organism thrive,” may very well be roughly utilized to life on Mars as properly.
“The principle salt on Mars seems to be sodium chloride,” he informed the publication, “which implies this concept may work.”
Schulze-Makuch recalled a examine that discovered that torrential rain killed 70 to 80 p.c of indigenous micro organism in a area of the Atacama Desert as a result of they “could not deal with that a lot water so all of a sudden.” In an analogous vein, the Viking landers could have inadvertently killed any signal of life throughout their experiments.
“Almost 50 years after the Viking biology experiments, it’s time for one more life detection mission — now that we’ve got a significantly better understanding of the Martian setting,” Schulze-Makuch wrote in his commentary.
However for now, this all stays principle.
“To make a protracted story quick, we might need to have a number of completely different sorts of life-detection strategies which can be unbiased of one another, and from there, we may give you extra convincing knowledge,” Schulze-Makuch informed House.com.
Extra on life on Mars: Life on Mars Could also be Trapped Beneath Ice, NASA Researchers Counsel
