According to the astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuchfrom the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, humans may well have unintentionally killed life on Mars in the 1970s. Explanations.
In 1976, during NASA’s Viking 1 mission, two spacecraft landed on the Red Planet to conduct an experiment that involved mixing water and nutrients with collected soil samples. At the time, scientists believed that life on Mars behaved the same way as life on Earth, in other words using liquid water to survive.
The first results that researchers thought were conclusive regarding the presence of life on Mars turned out to be false. According to the German astrobiologist, these spacecraft would have rather killed this life. “In hyper-arid 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. Experiments performed by NASA’s Viking landers may have accidentally killed Martian life by applying too much water. »
The specialist adding: “If these inferences about organisms surviving in hyper-arid 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 should additionally track hydrated and hygroscopic compounds – salts – as a means of locating microbial life. The idea of using table salt to create a brine, in which certain bacteria thrive, could also be applied to life on Mars. The main salt on Mars appears to be sodium chloride, which means this idea could work. Nearly 50 years after these biological experiments, it is time to launch another life-detection mission, now that we have a much better understanding of the Martian environment. »
To go further, know that recently, a Chinese rover found new evidence of the existence of an ancient ocean on Mars.
Belgium
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