Scientist says NASA lander may have accidentally killed lives on Mars

Astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, from the Technische Universität Berlin in Germany, believes humans may have unintentionally killed life on Mars in the 1970s.

During NASA’s Viking 1 mission in 1976, two spacecraft landed on the surface of the Red Planet and conducted an experiment mixing water and nutrients with collected soil samples. At the time, it was assumed that life on Mars would behave much like it does on Earth, relying on liquid water to survive.

If Space.com According to reports, early results gave researchers a tantalizing hint about the possibility of life on the Red Planet – but despite decades of debate, they have since largely concluded that their measurements were false positives.

However, Schulze-Makuch takes this thorny debate a step further and suggests that the Viking landers did indeed find life on Mars, but accidentally killed it with their water life-hunting experiments.

That’s because he argues that life on Mars may depend on salt deposits, much like the organisms that live in the driest places on Earth, such as the microbes that live in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

“In hyperarid environments, life can obtain water through salts that draw moisture from the atmosphere,” Schulze-Makuch wrote in a commentary for the journal Nature. “These salts should therefore be central to the search for life on Mars.”

“The experiments conducted by NASA’s Viking landers may have accidentally killed life on Mars by applying too much water,” he added.

The astrobiologist’s hypothesis refutes the assumption NASA scientists made in the 1970s that life requires liquid water to survive.

“If these inferences about organisms surviving in hyperarid conditions on Mars are correct, then instead of ‘following the water,’ which has long been NASA’s strategy in the search for life on the Red Planet, we could also find hydrated and hygroscopic compounds – salts – should follow. as a way to locate microbial life,” Schulze-Makuch wrote.

In an interview with Space.comthe researcher suggested that the idea of ​​using table salt to create a brine, in which “certain bacteria thrive,” could roughly also be applied to life on Mars.

“The main salt on Mars appears to be sodium chloride,” he told the publication, “which means this idea could work.”

Schulze-Makuch recalled a study showing that heavy rain killed 70 to 80 percent of native bacteria in a region of the Atacama Desert because they “couldn’t handle so much water so suddenly.” In a similar vein, the Viking landers may have accidentally killed any sign of life during their experiments.

“Nearly 50 years after the Viking biology experiments, it is time for a new life detection mission – now that we have a much better understanding of the Martian environment,” Schulze-Makuch wrote in his commentary.

But for now, this all remains theory.

“Long story short, we would like to have different kinds of life detection methods that are independent of each other, and from there we could come up with more convincing data,” Schulze-Makuch told us. Space.com.

More about life on Mars: Life on Mars may be trapped beneath the ice, NASA researchers suggest