Life on Mars was always surrounded by a lot of Controversy. However, scientists claim the Viking Mission of NASA must have killed life on Mars 50 years ago! The claims were made by Dirk Schulze-Makuch, from the Technical University Berlin. Let’s dive in to have a closer look at what happened to the life on the Red Planet.
The Viking mission in the 1970s studied the soil and atmosphere to identify any possibility of life. The scientists who went on the Mission have apparently poured water into the Martian soil. Their theory was that microorganisms lurking would consume the nutrients and release the radioactive carbon as a gas.
The test, known as the Viking Labeled Release experiment, turned out to be positive for metabolism at first. However, another parallel investigation suggested that there is no sign of organic material.
On the contrary, the scientists from the Technical University Berlin, say that the addition of water might have killed the life lurking on its soil. Schulze-Makuch says the pouring of water having a nutrient solution in the soil may have caused the death of the Martian life. Simply, the organisms must have not needed water to survive, and adding water could only have supported their eradication.
Astronomy professor in 2007 suggested that ‘Life on Mars‘ may have had Hydrogen peroxide in their cells. An adaptation of the organisms that simply suits the conditions on the red planet.
‘If the Martian cells contained hydrogen peroxide, that would have killed them. Moreover, it would have caused the hydrogen peroxide to react with any organic molecules in the vicinity to form large amounts of carbon dioxide — which is exactly what the instrument detected,‘ says Dirk Schulze-Makuch.
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