Dirk Schulze-Makuch, astrobiology professor and faculty member at the Technical University Berlin claim that alien life was discover on Mars 50 years ago, but unintentionally NASA destroy it.
In mid-1970s, NASA start the Viking programme, before starting Curiosity rover, and sent two landers to the Martian surface.
This mission with taking the first glimpses of the Martian surface, also perform a biological analysis of its soil to check for signs of life.
According to Schulze-Makuch, the mission’s findings had many geological formations consistent, which had done with effects of water.
Also, volcanoes at the Mars have their slopes bore close, which resembles to those in Hawaii, a hint at their previous exposure to rain.
Schulze-Makuch wrote in his column, the Viking landers had also identified tiny amounts of chlorinated organics which were initially believe to be contamination from Earth but the subsequent missions have confirm the presence of native organic compounds on Mars in a chlorinated form.
As part of the initial Viking experiments, water was infuse with nutrients and radioactive carbon was introduce to the red Martian soil.
As per the hypothesis, if there were potential microorganisms on Mars, they would use the nutrients and release radioactive carbon as a gas.
But while initial results indicate this radioactive gas’s emission, the remaining results remain inconclusive.
Schulze-Makuch point out that this exercise might have overwhelm these potential microbes, leading to their demise.
Schulze-Makuch said :
“Since Earth is a water planet, it seemed reasonable that adding water might coax life to show itself in the extremely dry Martian environment. In hindsight, it is possible that approach was too much of a good thing,”.
“Perhaps the putative Martian microbes collected for the labelled release experiments couldn’t deal with that amount of water and died off after a while… It would be as if an alien spaceship were to find you wandering half-dead in the desert, and your would-be saviours decide, ‘Humans need water. Let’s put the human in the middle of the ocean to save it!’ That wouldn’t work either,”.
The scientist then call for a new mission to Mars dedicate primarily to life detection to test this hypothesis and many others.
About Viking Mission
The Viking mission, involving two landers call as Viking 1 and Viking 2, land on 20th July, 1976, and 3rd September, 1976 respectively.
Both were equip with an array of instruments, including a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, seismometer, meteorology instrument, and stereo colour cameras.
