Viking mars landing11/25/2023 ![]() He requested in his Scientific American article that a panel of expert scientists review all the pertinent data from his Viking Labeled Release Experiment in light of other evidence collected on Mars since then. I suspect that too much water was added during the life detection experiments, possibly putting the Martians under osmotic shock and practically “drowning” them in their first encounter with humankind!īack to Gil Levin. Perhaps the mixed Viking results were due to the experiment design? Mars is drier than the driest desert on Earth, so any Martian microbe would have to be adapted to those conditions. Personally, I think Viking’s Pyrolytic Release Experiment also was intriguing, and suggestive of the presence of life, because it showed that organic synthesis was occurring after the addition of organic nutrients. Levin’s case for Martian life may be even stronger. The puzzling Viking results could be explained biologically if putative Martian microorganisms contain strong oxidants such as hydrogen peroxide inside their cells that would have reacted with organic compounds to produce carbon dioxide when heated up-as was observed during the Viking sample preparation on Mars. How could you have life if you had no organics?Īlso, we now know that there is plenty of water on Mars, even today, some of it in liquid form underground, and that there were lakes on the planet’s surface when it was wetter and warmer. ![]() The apparent lack of organics was an important reason for critics dismissing Levin’s claims at the time of Viking. And the trace organics detected by Viking, previously interpreted as contaminants, are now considered by many scientists to represent indigenous organic compounds. We are now confident that organic compounds do exist on Mars. Recent discoveries paint a more nuanced and complex picture. So for many years, Gil Levin remained the sole voice advocating that Viking had in fact found life. However, most scientists later concluded that the released carbon dioxide was more likely due to inorganic reactions of the chemically reactive Martian soil. The measurements observed on Mars were roughly consistent what you would expect if life were present. After Viking collected the soil, it was “spiked” with a set of organic nutrients, including amino acids. The experiment was designed to detect carbon dioxide in the Martian soil as a result of microbial metabolism. He bases his case primarily on the results of Viking’s Labeled Release Experiment, for which he was the principal investigator. In a recent opinion piece in Scientific American, former Viking Mars investigator Gil Levin fired up anew the argument over whether that mission did in fact discover Martian life in the 1970s, and whether we can now say there’s a conclusive case for life on the Red Planet.
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