NASA once discovered life on Mars but accidentally destroyed it?

Nearly five decades ago, NASA launched the Viking Program (1975-1983), an American unmanned Mars exploration program to search for signs of life on the Red Planet.

For eight years, the US space agency has sent orbiting probes called Viking Orbiter and lander called Viking Lander equipped with cameras to take pictures and infrared spectrometers to detect vapors. water and infrared radiometer for heat mapping.

Despite the fact that the mission was launched 48 years ago, some researchers have now pointed out failures when NASA's Viking analyzed evidence of life on Mars. The most recent person is Professor, Dr. Dirk Schulze-Makuch - President of the German Astrobiology Association.

"One of humanity's greatest mysteries may have been solved 50 years ago - but NASA may have accidentally destroyed all evidence of it"  -  Professor Dr. Dirk Schulze-Makuch  has offered this statement in an article for "Big Think".

Since its inception, the US space agency has undertaken a series of projects to chart the landscape of Mars and search for evidence proving the existence of extraterrestrial life on the Red Planet. And NASA may have found such evidence, but scientists may have accidentally "destroyed" it.

To prove his argument, Professor Dr. Dirk Schulze-Makuch mentioned the event that the Viking lander landed on the surface of Mars in the mid-1970s.

When the Viking 1 and 2 landers analyzed Martian soil for microbial life in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the results were… inconclusive.

Since then, most NASA scientists have concluded no life has been found on Mars because neither lander found any abundant organic matter in the planet's soil.

Mars - the planet that many scientists desire to conquer. (Photo: Internet).

How can there be bacteria without organic matter, the building blocks of life? Are there bacteria on Mars, but did soil tests on the NASA lander accidentally destroy them in the process?

Below are the arguments of German astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch published on "Big Think" on June 27, 2023.

4 experiments searching for life on Mars

The Viking landers performed four basic biological experiments on Mars. Viking conducted these four experiments on Martian soil samples. Each lander takes samples to its onboard laboratory and then executes them. While not as sophisticated as laboratories on Earth, they are considered fully capable of detecting living microbes, if they exist.

The life detection experiment  (1) is responsible for looking for signs of metabolism, the chemical reactions in organisms that maintain life processes. Involves converting energy in food into energy available to feed cells; converts food into the building blocks of proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, and some carbohydrates; and eliminate metabolic wastes.

The pyrolytic release experiment  (2) looks for evidence of organic synthesis.

The first two experiments seemed to yield positive results.

But the third experiment,  Gas Exchange Experiment  (3) , does not - This is the crux of the problem, which will be clarified at the end.

First, it adds a small amount of water to the samples. This was an attempt to see if any dormant bacteria could be revived by moisture, since Mars is so arid. Then, the experiment also added water containing 19 amino acids, vitamins, other organic compounds and some inorganic salts.

NASA's Viking 1 lander took this photo of the surrounding sand dunes and rocks on May 26, 1977. (Photo: NASA/ Wikimedia Commons / Roel van der Hoorn (Public Domain).

Scientists are excited about the initial positive results from the Life Detection Experiment and the Pyrolysis Release Experiment. However, there is one big problem.

The Viking landers also searched for organic matter in the soil using their fourth experiment,  Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS)  (4).

All Viking found were tiny traces of chlorinated organic matter.  These are organic compounds that contain at least one covalently bonded chlorine atom. Since only those substances were found and no other organics were found, mission scientists concluded that they were most likely contaminants from Earth aboard the lander. They are not the product of life and may not even have originated on Mars.

The lack of other organic matter is a blow to the possibility of life living on Martian soil.

"Without organic matter, there can be no life"

Professor Dr. Dirk Schulze-Makuch wrote:

[The Viking lander also carried an instrument to detect organic compounds. It found small amounts of chlorinated organics, which were explained at the time as the result of contamination from Earth. This led Viking project scientist Gerald Soffen to utter his famous quote, "Without organic matter, there can be no life." In other words, there could be no life on Mars without organic compounds. Thus, Gerald Soffen concluded, as did most other scientists at the time, that the Viking project had failed to find the presence of life on Mars.]

Professor Dr. Dirk Schulze-Makuch recently pointed out failures when analyzing evidence of life on Mars. (Photo: Internet).

It turns out decades later, there are organic substances on Mars. And they originate from the Red Planet, not contaminants brought there by spacecraft from Earth. NASA's own Curiosity and Perseverance rovers later confirmed the organic matter beyond any doubt. Previously, Phoenix Mars Lander was the next mission after Viking to recover organic matter.

Just as Viking found chlorinated organics, it is also known that Martian soil contains perchlorate, which can destroy organic molecules. This may also help explain the very low abundance of organic matter where the Viking landers sampled. Meanwhile, most recently found organic matter is preserved in rocks.

Destroy evidence of life?

One of the main goals in Viking's experiments was to add small amounts of water to soil samples. The idea is to turn soil microbes that may be dormant due to Mars' extremely dry and freezing conditions into more active ones as the addition of water can rejuvenate them to become active again.

The terrain is dry and harsh on Mars. (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS).

However, Professor Dr. Schulze-Makuch does not think so. He believes that bacteria on Mars are well adapted to harsh and extremely dry conditions. When water is added, this is no different from "submerging" them.

Technically, one would say adding moisture to them, but simply put, it's more like drowning them.

Perhaps microbes on Mars could be like those on Earth in Chile's arid Atacama Desert - they live only on salt, no liquid water. The bacteria here use a process called desiccation, in which some salts in the soil absorb water directly from the relative humidity of the air.

That is why Professor, Dr. Schulze-Makuch of NASA's Viking project contributed to the destruction of evidence of microorganisms living on Mars after Viking's experiment (3), causing the bacteria to gradually die afterward.