A new study suggests that the instruments on the Viking lander, which were supposed to look for the presence of life on Mars, apparently were not sensitive enough to detect life on Mars-like areas of the Earth which are known to have bacterial life. And the image below, taken by Mars Odyssey, shows what looks to be a lake on Mars.
Something tells me that we're not getting the whole story about the red planet, not by a long shot.
Update: This paper by Dr. Gil Levin goes into further detail about the shortcomings of the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GCMS), which have now been shown to be not sensitive enough to have found life even in Mars-like areas of Earth where life is known to exist. The GCMS results were used to discredit the results of the Labelled Release (LR) experiment on the Viking landers, which had indeed found evidence of microbial life. Since the LR experiment found evidence of microbial life and the GCMS was not sensitive enough to disprove the LR results, we must accept the results of the LR experiment: that there was indeed evidence of microbial activity on Mars in 1976. Whether that life is Martian or whether it piggybacked on the Viking landers themselves, I don't know.
Technorati Tags: Space, Mars
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