A well-known scientist has recently suggested something intriguing that might change our understanding of Mars exploration.
They think NASA's Viking landers may have accidentally found signs of Martian life almost 50 years ago, but they did not realize it and might have destroyed it unintentionally.
Viking's Intriguing Experiments
Back in 1976, NASA's Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers embarked on a mission to uncover the secrets of the Red Planet. Their primary mission? To detect signs of life on Mars.
The Viking landers conducted four vital experiments to achieve this goal, yielding perplexing results.
Two experiments, the labeled release and pyrolytic release, indicated subtle changes in gas concentrations that hinted at possible metabolic activity.
However, the gas exchange experiment, considered the most critical of the four, produced a discouraging negative result.
LiveScience tells us that this mixed bag of outcomes left scientists scratching their heads and, ultimately, led to the consensus that the Viking landers had not detected Martian life.
The Shocking New Hypothesis
Enter Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Technical University Berlin, who has recently turned the scientific community's understanding of those puzzling Viking results on its head.
In an article for Big Think, he suggested that the Viking landers might have encountered tiny, resilient Martian life forms concealed within the Red Planet's rocky terrain.
Schulze-Makuch argues that these potential Martian microorganisms could have been inadvertently annihilated by the very experiments designed to detect them.
The experiments, it turns out, may have "overwhelmed these potential microbes" by adding too much water to the soil samples.
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Microbial Adaptation to Harsh Conditions
Schulze-Makuch's hypothesis hinges on the idea that Martian life could have adapted to its arid environment by residing within salt rocks and absorbing water directly from the thin Martian atmosphere.
On Earth, similar extremophiles thrive in desolate regions like Chile's Atacama Desert, where they shelter within hygroscopic rocks.
These rocks, incredibly salty and capable of drawing in minuscule amounts of water from the atmosphere, could provide the shelter and moisture needed for Martian microbes to survive.
If these microbes also contained hydrogen peroxide, a chemical compatible with some Earth-based life forms, they might have produced some of the gases detected by the Viking landers.
Support from Previous Studies
Schulze-Makuch's claims find support in a 2018 study published in the journal Scientific Reports. This study revealed that extreme floods in Chile's Atacama Desert had eradicated up to 85% of indigenous microbes that could not adapt to wetter conditions. This research underscores the delicate balance of moisture for extremophiles.
Controversy and Skepticism
Naturally, this provocative hypothesis has sparked controversy. In 2018, another group of researchers proposed that heating soil samples during the Viking experiments could have killed any Martian microbes present.
Moreover, LiveScience reports that some scientists believe that the presence of perchlorate, a chemical found on Mars, and its byproducts can adequately explain the gases detected in the Viking experiments, effectively debunking the need for a new type of Martian life.
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