After many hardships, a researcher in the field of biology was able to extract data indicating the existence of life on Mars from an experiment carried out on the Viking spacecraft in 1976
In the image, an imaginary future astronaut places an American flag next to the Viking 2 spacecraft when it lands on Mars Experiments conducted more than twenty years ago on the soil of Mars, by the spacecraft Viking 1 and 2, provided evidence that life may exist on Mars. Says Dr. Joseph Miller, a professor in the Department of Cell and Neurobiology at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. Miller recently conducted a renewed analysis of data collected by the astronauts, and found that something in the soil that was collected, according to him, was able to metabolize nutrients - and it does so in a distinct biological rhythm that could only be found in a living cell. Miller presented his findings earlier this week at a symposium dealing with extraterrestrial biology (exobiology) held during the 46th convention of the Society of Optical Engineers. In August and September 1975, two Viking spacecraft were launched from Cape Canaveral. After flying for almost a year, they separately reached the Martian atmosphere and landed at two landing points on the planet. As soon as they arrived, they began a series of experiments, which included a robotic arm that was sent up and dug up soil samples and spread them in petri dishes, along with a drop of food solution labeled with radioactive carbon. The idea, Miller explains, was that if there was a living organism in the sample, they would take the labeled nutrients and process them, eventually releasing the radioactive carbon in a gaseous state. A radiation detector installed near the covered plates was connected to them through tubes through which the released gas had to pass. And indeed these gases passed, Miller said. When the data was collected, the original Viking researchers, Patricia Strat and Gilbert Levin, found tangible evidence of the release of gas. It seems as if they have discovered life on Mars - but other scientists have argued that these gases can be better explained as the result of chemical reactions with active components such as superoxides or peroxides. Due to the inability to prove that the gas emission was created by living creatures, NASA scientists decided to abandon the issue. And so these data lay more or less untreated until 1999. Miller, who worked for NASA in the early XNUMXs, studied the effects of zero gravity on the rhythm circuits of squirrel monkeys, and began writing a proposal for NASA to conduct biological experiments on future missions to Mars. Then he also discovered a figure in the Geophysical Journal taken from the Viking 2 data—a figure that showed abundant cyclic gas in Levin and Sarat's experiment. Although the science of the biological clock was not developed at the time of the Viking experiments to help researchers advance their research, it developed greatly in the years that followed. Miller knew right away that he had something potential on his hands. I was immediately interested, so I asked NASA to re-examine the data." It took several calls and four months to uncover the data Miller asked to see. And when NASA found the data, a problem arose. They were stored on magnetic tapes in such an old format that the programmer who knew it had passed away." Miller said. In the end, NASA was able to recover the data from the printouts that were fortunately preserved by Levin and Sarat. – and so Miller could explore the data. There were many of them - in fact, their analysis is still ongoing. But after processing about 30 percent of the experimental data, Miller was able to find something distinct - something, he said, that was not discernible in the original paper. "The signal itself not only had a circadian rhythm," Miller said, "but it even had a 24.66-hour cycle—the length of the red-light day." More specifically, Miller says that the fluctuations in the gas emissions appear to be emitted from material with temperature differences of 2 degrees Celsius inside the lander, which protects them from changes of the order of 50 degrees on the Martian surface. Temperature changes are the main cause of circadian rhythms, so even changes of 2 degrees are observed on Earth sometimes quite urgently. To the original critics who claimed that the gases could also be emitted by inorganic processes from the Martian soil, Miller says that such a process is difficult to describe at all. They took such materials for a similar food solution on Earth, and the soil sample was destroyed and did not release the materials, and it is still necessary to explain the cycle that was maintained for nine consecutive weeks." "There is no reason for pure chemical reactions to be so strongly synchronized to such small temperature changes." he added. "We believe that matching the images taken by the Mars Observer, which showed signs of water flowing on the surface in the recent past, many of the elements characteristic of life are there. I remember in 1976, Viking explorers had great reason to believe they had discovered life. I would say it is a 75% certainty. Now, with this discovery, the chance increases to 90 percent.
