2023-09-11 06:00:04
An astrobiologist suggests NASA’s Viking landers might have discovered life forms on Mars in 1976, but instead destroyed them. This controversial assertion revives the debate on the enigmatic results of the experiments carried out by these missions.
Image d’illustration Pixabay
Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at the Technical University of Berlin, recently proposed that NASA’s Viking landers might have sampled tiny life forms. life is the name given 🙂 resistant to drought on Mars. According to him, the tests carried out by the landers killed them before they were identified.
The Viking landers conducted four different experiments on the Red Planet. Some have shown changes in the concentration of certain gases, suggesting a form of metabolism. Metabolism is the set of molecular and energetic transformations. ..). However, most scientists concluded that these experiments did not detect Martian life.
An artistic view of one of the Viking landers.
Image NASA
Schulze-Makuch thinks the experiments may have produced biased results by using too much water. In very dry environments on Earth (Earth is the third planet in the Solar System in order of distance…), such as the desert Atacama in Chile, extreme microbes can survive by hiding in hygroscopic rocks. These rocks are also present on Mars.
Alberto Fairén, an astrobiologist at Cornell University, supports this theory (The word theory comes from the Greek word theorein, which means “to contemplate, observe,…). He thinks adding water to Viking’s soil samples might have killed possible hygroscopic microbes.
Microscopic image of a bacteria of the genus Acinetobacter. Extreme, drought-tolerant strains of these microbes are found in the Atacama Desert of Chile.
Credit: Janice Carr/Wikimedia
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