Viking robots found life on Mars in 1976, scientists say
Researchers put
data into sets of numbers, then analyzed the results for complexity
New
analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows that NASA
found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists
conclude in a paper published this week.
Further, NASA
doesn't need a human expedition to Mars to nail down the claim,
neuropharmacologist and biologist Joseph Miller, with the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, told Discovery News.
"The
ultimate proof is to take a video of a Martian bacteria. They should send a
microscope — watch the bacteria move," Miller said.
"On the
basis of what we've done so far, I'd say I'm 99 percent sure there's life
there," he added.
Miller's
confidence stems in part from a new study that reanalyzed results from a
life-detection experiment conducted by NASA's Viking Mars robots in 1976.
Researchers
crunched raw data collected during runs of the Labeled Release experiment,
which looked for signs of microbial metabolism in soil samples scooped up and
processed by the two Viking landers. General consensus of scientists has been
that the experiment found geological, not biological, activity.
The new study
took a different approach. Researchers distilled the Viking Labeled Release
data, provided as hard copies by the original researchers, into sets of numbers
and analyzed the results for complexity. Since living systems are more
complicated than non-biological processes, the idea was to look at the
experiment results from a purely numerical perspective.
They found close
correlations between the Viking experiment results' complexity and those of
terrestrial biological data sets. They say the high degree of order is more
characteristic of biological, rather than purely physical, processes.
Critics counter
that the method has not yet been proven effective for differentiating between
biological and non-biological processes on Earth, so it's premature to draw any
conclusions.
"Ideally, to
use a technique on data from Mars, one would want to show that the technique
has been well-calibrated and well-established on Earth. The need to do so is
clear; on Mars we have no way to test the method, while on Earth we can,"
planetary scientist and astrobiologist Christopher McKay, with NASA's Ames
Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., told Discovery News.
While not
iron-clad, the findings are an additional plank of evidence challenging the
popular contention that Viking did not find life, Miller said.
Miller also is
reanalyzing the data to see if there are variations when sunlight was blocked
by a weeks-long dust storm on Mars, with the idea being that biological systems
would have acted differently to the environmental change than geologic ones.
Results of the research are expected to be presented in August.
The research is
published online in the International
Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences.
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