NASA may have accidentally killed alien life on Mars 50 years ago

NASA may have discovered alien life on Mars 50 years ago when it first put its two Viking landers on the Red Planet, but the agency may have also accidentally killed it. The claims were made by Dirk Schulze-Makuch from the Technical University Berlin, who believes an experiment carried out in the 1970s that added water to the soil drowned any life lurking in the Martian landscape.

The test, known as the Viking Labeled Release experiment, initially returned positive for metabolism, but a related investigation found no trace of organic material. Schulze-Makuch believes the water containing a nutrient solution in the soil may have been too much liquid ‘and [any life] died off after a while.’ While the theories may sound outlandish to some, this is the case for microbes living inside salt rocks in the Atacama, which has a similar landscape to Mars, that do not need rain to survive – and too much water would eradicate them. The two landers in NASA’s Viking mission touched down on Mars on July 20, 1976 (Viking 1) and September 3, 1976 (Viking 2).

The landers were equipped with a slew of instruments, including gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, seismometer, meteorology instrument, and stereo color cameras. The devices enabled them to search for possible signs of life and study the soil and atmosphere’s physical and magnetic properties. Schulze-Makuch called the results ‘puzzling’ in an op-ed for BigThink, which he shared that one of the tests came back positive, and another was negative for gas exchange. Still, small amounts of chlorinated organics were identified. The test positive for life added water to the soil to see if products of respiration and metabolism appeared. The theory was that if life were on Mars, microorganisms would consume the nutrients and release the radioactive carbon as a gas.

In a 2007 study, the astronomy professor suggested that Martian life could have hydrogen peroxide in their cells. ‘This adaptation would have the particular advantages in the Martian environment of providing a low freezing point, a source of oxygen and hygroscopicity,’ Schultz-Makuch and co-author Joop M. Houtkooper wrote in the study. ‘If we assume that indigenous Martian life might have adapted to its environment by incorporating hydrogen peroxide into its cells, this could explain the Viking results,’ Dirk Schulze-Makuch wrote. ‘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.’

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