Science News Desk – In all our missions and efforts to Mars so far, no evidence has been found that would allow us to say with certainty that there is life on Mars. But, decades ago in the 1970s, when the Viking lander became the first American mission to safely land on and explore the Red Planet, we might have gotten closer. A researcher has raised the possibility that life was present in Martian soil samples. Then, in our quest to confirm it, we may have eliminated it. An experiment to detect signs of microbial life on Mars could have been fatal, according to Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astronomer at the Technical University of Berlin in Germany.
This story is hard to ignore
Don’t ignore this story as an attempt to become famous! The claims made in it may seem impossible to you, but there are some important lessons in it which our scientists should never ignore. Let us know what this claim is and what is the whole story. In a column posted in Big Think last year and a commentary published in Nature Astronomy in September this year, he speculated that our methods could be destructive in themselves.
That special investigation of the 1970s
In 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 mission sent two spacecraft to the surface of Mars to investigate the Red Planet and search for signs of life. These experiments involved mixing water and nutrients with soil samples collected from Mars. The idea behind this was that life on Mars, like life on Earth, would need liquid water to survive. Early results indicated the possibility of life, but after decades of debate, most researchers concluded that the results were probably false positives, i.e. giving false hope.
So what would have happened in that experiment?
Now, Schulze-Makuch has proposed a theory that Viking landers may have actually encountered life on Mars, but inadvertently destroyed it by dousing it with water. In a commentary for Nature, Schulze-Makuch wrote that potential Martian life could survive in very dry conditions by relying on salts to draw moisture from the atmosphere. And it may be similar to microorganisms found in extreme environments such as Chile’s Atacama Desert. “Experiments conducted by NASA’s Viking landers may have accidentally killed Martian life by adding too much water,” he said.
Future missions may also face problems
This hypothesis challenges NASA’s long-term strategy of searching for life beyond Earth by “following the water.” Schulze-Makuch argues that instead of prioritizing liquid water, future missions should also focus on hygroscopic salts, substances that absorb atmospheric moisture. Sodium chloride, the elemental salt on Mars, could potentially sustain microbial life, similar to some bacteria that thrive in salty solutions on Earth.
The researcher compared the potential impact of the Viking experiment on Martian microorganisms to what happened in the Atacama Desert, where torrential rains killed 70–80% of local bacteria because they could not adapt to the flow of water. Nearly 50 years after the Viking mission, Schultz-Makuch called for a renewed effort to detect life on Mars, incorporating new, advanced technology and knowledge about the planet’s extreme environments. “It’s time for another life-detecting mission,” he insisted, while acknowledging that his theory was still speculative. “We will need many independent ways to detect life to get solid evidence.”
