Fifty years in the past this August, the dual Viking spacecraft have been launched towards Mars. They landed throughout the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976 at separate places with three experiment packages designed to detect life if it existed. Two of the three yielded destructive outcomes on each landers, however one end result was ambiguous. The labeled-release experiment detected uncommon exercise that the researchers couldn’t clarify when radioactively labeled vitamins have been added to the soil. The exercise gave rise to speculations that one thing alive within the soil was metabolizing the vitamins — speculations that, whereas distant, have lingered to the current day.
Subsequent landers, starting with Phoenix in 2008, found a excessive focus of perchlorates within the soil. Perchlorates are chlorinated salts, typically utilized in fireworks. These reactive salts have been discovered to be virtually ubiquitous on Mars. Now, within the journal Icarus, NASA astrobiologist Christopher McKay and two colleagues have decided that the reactions within the Viking landers can now be defined: “Perchlorate, plus abiotic oxidants, explains the Viking outcomes and there’s no requirement to postulate life on Mars.”
