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Is there life on any planet other than Earth? Scientists around the world have been trying to find the answer to this question for decades. Apart from Earth, which is surrounded by disasters due to climate change on Earth, life is being searched on other planets, meanwhile an astro-biologist has made a big revelation.
Astro-biologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch of the Technic University in Berlin, Germany, has made a big claim about a mission sent by NASA 5 decades ago. He has expressed apprehension that during the Viking mission sent to Mars in the 70s, NASA had inadvertently destroyed the possibilities of life.
What was NASA’s Viking mission?
The US space agency NASA launched the Viking mission in 1975 to search for life on Mars. NASA sent two spacecraft to the surface of the ‘Red Planet’ to investigate the possibilities of life. NASA’s Viking-1 was the first spacecraft to land on the surface of Mars. On 19 June 1976, this spacecraft reached the orbit of Mars and after orbiting for about a month, it identified a suitable surface and landed in the Klyas Planitia region of the red planet. A few months later, NASA launched the ‘Viking-2’ mission which sent high-resolution pictures of the surface of Mars to Earth, these pictures surprised the whole world.
Possibility of life ended due to NASA’s mistake?
Actually, during this Viking mission, NASA had tested the soil of Mars by mixing it with water and nutrients. NASA, imagining the requirements necessary for life on Earth, tested these elements by mixing them, in which the initial results indicated the possibilities of life on Mars. However, decades later, most researchers believe that the results of that test were wrong.
Now Schulze-Makuch has proposed a radical theory according to which the Viking landers may have discovered life on Mars but inadvertently destroyed the possibility of life by mixing its soil with water.
Is life possible on Mars without water?
In a commentary for Nature, Schulze-Makuch wrote that potential Martian life could survive in extremely dry conditions by relying on salts to draw moisture from the atmosphere, similar to microorganisms found in extreme environments such as Chile’s Atacama Desert. He explained that NASA’s Viking lander may have accidentally added too much water, eliminating the possibility of life on Mars.
This hypothesis challenges NASA’s long-standing strategy of finding water as a key factor in the search for life on other planets.
Targeting hygroscopic salts
Schulze-Makuch says that instead of prioritizing the liquid form of water, future missions should target hygroscopic salts, which are substances that absorb moisture from the atmosphere. Sodium chloride, the main salt found on Mars, could potentially sustain microbial life, as some bacteria on Earth thrive in brine solutions.
The researcher compared the possible impact of the Viking experiment on Martian microorganisms to what happened in the Atacama Desert, where torrential rain killed 70 to 80% of indigenous bacteria because they could not adapt to the flow of water.
Appeal for changes in future missions
Nearly 50 years after the Viking mission, Schulze-Makuch has appealed for a renewed effort to detect life on Mars, including new efforts and information about the planet’s extreme environment. He stressed, ‘It is time for another life-detecting mission.’ However, he admitted that his theory is still based on speculation. To make it reliable evidence, many independent methods of life detection need to be used.
