Life's Building Blocks May Have Been Found on Mars
Life's Building Blocks May Have Been Found on Mars, Research Finds
By Mike Wall
SPACE.com Senior Writer
posted: 06 January 2011
03:14 pm ET
NASA's Viking landers may have detected the ingredients for life on Mars after all, according to a new study.
Back in the 1970s, the two Viking probes scooped up and heated Martian dirt, then looked for organic molecules - the carbon-based building blocks of life as we know it - in the samples. The landers found little, aside from two strange chlorine compounds that researchers at the time attributed to contamination from cleaning fluids.
But the new study suggests that the soil did indeed contain organics, which can have biological or non-biological origins. They were just destroyed before Viking could detect them.
Full Article...
By Mike Wall
SPACE.com Senior Writer
posted: 06 January 2011
03:14 pm ET
NASA's Viking landers may have detected the ingredients for life on Mars after all, according to a new study.
Back in the 1970s, the two Viking probes scooped up and heated Martian dirt, then looked for organic molecules - the carbon-based building blocks of life as we know it - in the samples. The landers found little, aside from two strange chlorine compounds that researchers at the time attributed to contamination from cleaning fluids.
But the new study suggests that the soil did indeed contain organics, which can have biological or non-biological origins. They were just destroyed before Viking could detect them.
Full Article...