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Scientists have suggested that NASA originally found life on Mars 40 years ago. The spacecraft used for the mission, however, may have accidentally evaporated organic materials that would have been the first evidence of a Martian life. (19459013) Aynur Zakirov | Pixabay )
A team of scientists suspects NASA of finding organic molecules, evidence of life on Mars 40 years ago, but accidentally destroyed them .
To land a spaceship safely on the surface of Mars was the Viking program in 1976. It involved two identical spacecraft called Viking landers. The landing gear flew together, separated, and conducted three biological experiments designed to look for signs of life.
Landers have not found any living organism with the exception of an unidentified chemical activity on the soil of the red planet. This was a surprise for the agency as carbon-rich meteorites and comets should have at least created a unique form of organic matter on the red planet. This incident has since been a scientific mystery for 40 years.
Now, a study of a team of scientists proposed that the Viking landers, when they landed on the Martian soil, impacted the first organic material that could have been discovered at To conduct the study , published in Journal of Geophysical Research on June 20, the team examined data from Viking landers to check if anything was overlooked. After all, the team firmly believed that all living terrestrial beings should contain organic matter, which means that Viking landers should have discovered something in 1976.
In 2008, the Phoenix spacecraft found a salt in the Martian soil. This salt, called perchlorate, is rare on Earth but is used to make fireworks because it explodes when it is exposed to high temperatures.
In 2014, Mars Curiosity found organic molecules on Mars. One of the discovered materials was chlorobenzene: a molecule that forms when carbonaceous materials are burned with perchlorate.
Now, the team of scientists suspected that two things could happen. One – and the proposal supported by the main author of the document – was that since the main instrument on board Viking landers, called the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer or GCMS, needed to heat the Martian soil samples to find organic matter, Chris McKay, lead author of the document and a planetary researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center, said the Viking undercarriages needed to heat the ground on Mars so the ground releases vapors. These vapors were subjected to further analysis. McKay thinks that by warming up the soil sample, the Viking landers inadvertently lighted perchlorate, with which "would have been" the first evidence of life on Mars.
The Second Possibility
All scientists involved in the study did not support McKay's position. Melissa Guzman of the LATMOS Research Center in France, who is involved in the study, said she was not convinced that chlorobenzene formed when the Viking undercarriages heated up. Mars soil. She said that another possibility was that chlorobenzene could come from the Earth aboard NASA equipment. Guzman said that there was simply no sufficient evidence that Viking landers were burning salt on Martian soil.
Nevertheless, the paper's final conclusion says that salt would have chlorinated any organic material in Viking instruments. "We conclude that the chlorine component of chlorobenzene is Martian, and that the chlorobenzene carbon molecule is compatible with a Martian origin, although we can not completely rule out instrumental contamination," the team concludes in its article.
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