A lander is a spacecraft designed to land on the surface of a celestial body, like a satellite or a planet. For astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Technische Universität Berlin, NASA’s Viking landers that arrived on Mars in 1976 would have potentially destroyed life.
Less life on Mars because of humans
Finding life elsewhere than here, on Earth, continues to make us dream. However, Mars offers a favorable environment for the development of life, thanks to the past presence of water, and still present ice.
Man would not have helped the development of the latter by wanting to explore the red planet. Dirk Schulze-Makuch has suggested that the Viking landers potentially caused casualties during their search for life in the water.
This assumption follows one of his hypotheses: the fact that life on Mars depends on salt deposits, “just like the organisms that live in the driest places on Earth, like the microbes that inhabit the Atacama Desert in Chile,” says Futurism.
NASA’s Viking Lander Experiments
“In hyperarid environments, life can obtain water from salts that draw moisture from the atmosphere […] These salts should therefore be at the heart of research into life on Mars,” underlines Dirk Schulze-Makuch in the journal Nature.
With the Viking landers, astrobiology speculates that they “may have accidentally killed Martian life by applying too much water” during their experiments. This hypothesis goes against NASA scientists, who explained during the 1970s that life needed liquid water to survive.
He also recalls in passing that a study had shown that torrential rains in the Attacam desert had killed 70 to 80% of the indigenous bacteria, because they “could not withstand such a quantity of water so suddenly”. Dirk Schulze-Makuch thus relates this to Mars and the two spacecraft sent by Man: “In the same vein, the Viking landers may have inadvertently killed all signs of life during their experiments” .
Relaunch the search for life on Mars
“If these inferences about organisms surviving in hyperarid conditions on Mars are correct, then rather than ‘follow the water,’ which has long been NASA’s strategy in the search for life on the Red Planet, we “We should also follow hydrated and hygroscopic compounds – salts – as a means of locating microbial life,” concludes Dirk Schulze-Makuch.
Speaking to Space.com, the researcher adds that the creation of a brine based on table salt, where “certain bacteria develop”, could also be applied to life on Mars. An idea that makes sense, and which could relaunch the machine 50 years after the Viking landers.
Astrobiology thus underlines that it is time for a new mission to discover life on Mars, and even more so since we know better the environment of the red planet.
“In short, we would like to have several types of life detection methods, independent of each other, and from there we could obtain more convincing data,” he concludes.
