Until now, no exploration of the planet Mars has succeeded in formally proving that it harbors a form of life. However, in the 1970s, NASA’s American Viking program – the first to land probes on Mars – was close to the goal, but the methods used may well have been counterproductive.
In any case, this is what astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, from the Technical University of Berlin in Germany, suggests, according to the media ScienceAlert. In a column published on Big Think in June 2023 and in a text published in Nature Astronomy in September 2024, he hypothesizes that the search for microbial life on Mars at the time was destructive – if it turns out that Mars shelters life well.
When they landed on the Red Planet in 1976, the two Viking probes had a list of objectives. One of them consisted of carrying out a series of experiments intended to test Martian soil for biosignatures, that is to say traces of molecules indicating the presence of a form of life. One of these experiments used a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) apparatus, which detected chlorinated organic compounds.
At the time, this finding was interpreted as contamination from human cleaning products. However, we now know that chlorinated organic compounds are native to Mars, although it is still unclear whether they are produced by biological or non-biological processes. The GC-MS device had to heat the samples to separate the different materials they contained. Later analysis revealed that this could have burned the organic substances the researchers hoped to find.
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Dirk Schulze-Makuch also suggests that other experiments could have destroyed…
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