NASA may have accidentally destroyed evidence of organics on Mars 40 years ago

NASA announced last month that Mars has complex organic molecules, which could indicate the current or past life of the planet. There is a lot of work to be done before we can understand the meaning of this discovery, but some researchers have also begun to wonder why the discovery took so long. It turns out that NASA discovered and accidentally destroyed organic molecules on Mars in the 1970s.

Scientists have long been waiting for organic molecules to be present on Mars, if only because that carbon-rich meteorites frequently hit the planet. However, the Viking landers that landed on the Red Planet in 1976 found no trace of organic matter in their soil sample samples. It was surprising at the time, and we now know that the results were inaccurate. So, what happened?

A new analysis of Viking data focuses on other compounds that may have affected the results. In 2008, the Phoenix Lander confirmed the presence of perchlorate on Mars. This chlorine-oxygen salt is used in the production of fireworks and propellants because it is a powerful oxidizer that can be explosive in good conditions.

The presence of perchlorate is important because the Viking landing gear used a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer to analyze soil samples. This instrument heats the material to determine the chemical composition, but heating the perchlorate in the presence of organic molecules will destroy the organic matter. It is therefore possible that NASA is about to make this breakthrough discovery decades ago, but the LG has burned all the evidence

Carl Sagan, the dead astronomer, stands next from a model of Viking landers

. was the hypothesis, but a lack of organic molecules in the Viking data is not a smoking gun. The researchers turned to more recent discoveries of Curiosity, which indicated that Mars also contained chlorobenzene in its soil. This compound appears when the organics are oxidized by perchlorate. The team suspected that Viking could also have produced chlorobenzene from burning organic molecules in its sample collector. They looked back at the original Viking data and confirmed that, yes, he also detected chlorobenzene.

This is not definitive proof, but many researchers are convinced that NASA was terribly close to the discovery of organic substances on Mars 40 years ago. This could have changed our approach to studying the planet in the intervening years, but it is difficult to account for all eventualities when your scientific instruments are millions of kilometers away.