Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Monday October 24 2016, @01:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the Betteridge's-law-at-work dept.

Phys.org is reporting on a recent paper from the journal Astrobiology.

Viking LR experimentors Gilbert Levin and Patricia Straat are trying to determine whether the experiment actually identified life on Mars or not.

From the Phys.Org article:

In 1976, two Viking landers became the first US spacecraft from Earth to touch down on Mars. They took the first high-resolution images of the planet, surveyed the planet's geographical features, and analyzed the geological composition of the atmosphere and surface. Perhaps most intriguingly, they also performed experiments that searched for signs of microbial life in Martian soil.

Overall, these life-detection experiments produced surprising and contradictory results. One experiment, the Labeled Release (LR) experiment, showed that the Martian soil tested positive for metabolism—a sign that, on Earth, would almost certainly suggest the presence of life. However, a related experiment found no trace of organic material, suggesting the absence of life. With no organic substances, what could be, or seem to be, metabolizing?

[...] In the LR experiment, both the Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers collected samples of Martian soil, injected them with a drop of dilute nutrient solution, and then monitored the air above the soil for signs of metabolic byproducts. Since the nutrients were tagged with radioactive carbon-14, if microorganisms in the soil metabolized the nutrients, they would be expected to produce radioactive byproducts, such as radioactive carbon dioxide or methane.

[...] Ever since the LR experiments, researchers have been searching for other kinds of nonbiological chemicals that might produce identical results.

In their new paper, Levin and Straat review some of these proposals. One possible candidate is formate, which is a component of formic acid found naturally on Earth. A 2003 LR-type experiment found that formate in a soil sample from the Atacama Desert in South America produced a positive result, even though the soil contained virtually no microorganisms. However, the study did not include a sterilization control, and it's likely that the formate concentration in the Atacama Desert is much higher than that on Mars.

Another potential candidate is perchlorate or one of its breakdown products. In 2009, the Phoenix mission to Mars detected perchlorates in the Martian soil. Although perchlorates could yield a positive result because they produce gas when interacting with some amino acids, they do not break down at 160 °C, and so would continue to give positive results after the sterilization control.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday October 24 2016, @02:45PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Monday October 24 2016, @02:45PM (#418161)

    Wasn't my first interpretation, but yeah.

    Seems like I keep running into sentences lately of the "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" form that require me to go back and reparse it to figure out what the verb is. Sometimes zealous comma use helps. Or in this case, maybe italicize "Viking?"

    Whether to quote or italicize book/article/magazine titles is another one of those arbitrary rules I'd have to look up.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2