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NASA found life on Mars in the 1970s, says the agency's scientist

2019-10-15T09:20:24.114Z


It is possible that we have already discovered the essence of life on Mars 40 years ago, according to Gilbert V. Levin, a NASA scientist, who was a principal investigator in an experiment that sent l ...


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(CNN) - We may have already discovered the essence of life on Mars 40 years ago, according to a NASA scientist.

Gilbert V. Levin, who was a principal investigator in a NASA experiment that sent the unmanned Viking missions to Mars in 1976, published an article in Scientific American last Thursday in which he argues that the positive results of the experiment were proof of life on the red planet.

  • NASA is close to finding life on Mars, but the world is not ready for discovery, says the agency's chief scientist

The experiment, called Labeled Release (LR), was designed to analyze Martian soil for organic matter. "It seemed that we had answered that definitive question," Levin wrote in the article.

In the experiment, Viking probes placed nutrients in the soil samples of Mars; if there were life, it would consume food and leave gaseous traces of its metabolism, which radioactive monitors would detect.

To ensure that it was a biological reaction, the test was repeated after altering the soil, which would be lethal to known life. If there were a measurable reaction in the first and not in the second sample, that would suggest functioning biological forces, and that is exactly what happened, according to Levin.

However, other experiments could not find any organic material and NASA could not duplicate the results in its laboratory, so they ruled out the positive result as false positives, some unknown chemical reaction instead of an extraterrestrial life test.

"NASA concluded that the LR had found a substance that mimicked life, but not life," Levin said in his article. "Inexplicably, during the 43 years since Viking, none of NASA's subsequent missions on Mars has carried a life detection instrument to follow up on these exciting results."

But now, decades later, there are increasingly promising signs. NASA's Curiosity rover vehicle found organic matter on Mars in 2018, and only last week found sediments that suggest there were once ancient salty lakes on the planet's surface.

"What is the evidence against the possibility of life on Mars?" Levin wrote. "The surprising fact is that there is none."

Levin, a hipster researcher who has often faced the bureaucracy of NASA, has insisted for decades that "we are more likely to detect life." Now, he and LR co-experimenter Patricia Ann Straat are asking for more research.

"NASA has already announced that its Mars 2020 landing module will not contain a test for life detection," Levin wrote in the Scientific American article. "According to a well-established scientific protocol, I believe that an effort should be made to put life detection experiments on the next Mars mission."

He proposed that the LR experiment be repeated on Mars, with certain adjustments, and then that a panel of experts study its data.

"A jury so objective could conclude, as I did, that the Viking LR found life," he wrote.

NASA's Mars 2020 rover is scheduled for launch next summer and will land in February 2021. It carries an instrument that will help you find ancient signs of life on Mars, known as SHERLOC.

The rover will look for past habitable environments, look for biological signatures in rock and analyze those samples on Earth.

But if scientists fail to find evidence of life, that will not end in the hope of human exploration. Mars 2020 will also test the production of oxygen on the planet and observe the Martian climate to evaluate how human colonies on Mars could do.

Scottie Andrew and Richard Stenger contributed to this report.

MarsNASA

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2019-10-15

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