Nasa accidentally BURNED best evidence for life on Mars 40 years ago
The gaffe was caused by Nasa's historic Viking probes – the first landers to touchdown on the martian surface
Evidence of life on Mars was torched to ash during NASA's first touchdown mission on the Red Planet more than 40 years ago, scientists claim.
The space agency's Viking Landers, the first craft to land on the martian surface, may have accidentally found and obliterated the raw materials for life using their gas instruments, according to a new study.
Nasa's Viking 1 and 2 missions landed on Mars ten months apart in 1975 and 1976.
Though designed to last just 90 days, the landers wound up collecting data on the Red Planet for over six years, including 4,500 close-up images of the Martian surface and a whopping 50,000 orbiting snaps, mapping 97 percent of the planet.
But one thing was missing: the Viking craft hadn't found the organics they set out for, which scientists long suspected existed on Mars.
They were proved right last month when NASA revealed that its Curiosity Rover – a successor to Viking – had found "building blocks of life" in a three billion-year-old lakebed on the planet.
The space agency knew that small, carbon-rich meteorites regularly pelted Mars, meaning its surface should've been covered in organic molecules.
"It was just completely unexpected and inconsistent with what we knew," Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and author of the new paper, told .
In order to test the Martian soil, the Viking landers used gas instruments to heat their samples into releasing vapours that they could then examine for the presence of organic material.
How long does it take to get to Mars?
It's not that short of a trip...
- There's an immense distance between Earth and Mars, which means any trip to the red planet will take a very long time
- It's also made more complicated by the fact that the distance is constantly changing as the two planets rotate around the sun
- The closest that the Earth and Mars would ever be is a distance of 33.9million miles – that's 9,800 times the distance between London and New York
- That's really rare though: the more useful distance is the average, which is 140million miles
- Scientists on Earth have already launched a whole bunch of spacecraft to (or near) Mars, so we have a rough idea of how long it takes with current technology
- Historically, the trip has taken anywhere from 128 to 333 days - admittedly a huge length of time for humans to be on board a cramped spacecraft.
The new study claims that in doing so, the probes would have burned up a highly-flammable salt known as perchlorate in the Martian soil.
This compound, used to make fireworks on Earth, was found by Nasa's Phoenix lander on the Red Planet in 2008.
But the discovery still didn't offer conclusive proof that the Viking landers had screwed up all those decades ago, so the investigation continued.
Then came a breakthrough when the Curiosity Rover recently discovered chlorobenzene, which is created when carbon molecules burn with perchlorate.
Digging further into the Viking data, McKay and his cohorts found that the landers also detected chlorobenzene, which they suggest came about when the soil samples were burnt by the landers.
The study concludes that the probes did find organic material, but destroyed any sign of them when they heated perchlorate in the samples.
However, Melissa Guzman – a scientist at the LATMOS research centre in France who also worked on the paper – has put forward another possible scenario.
She claims that the chlorobenzene Viking found may have come from material they carried from Earth to Mars.
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But Dr Daniel Glavin, from Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, declared that the paper finally proves that the probes found evidence for life on the planet.
"This paper really seals the deal," the scientist, who was not involved in the study, told New Scientist.
Along with the recent Curiosity data, the fresh research indicates organic material is scattered across a range of sites on Mars – meaning more discoveries could be on the horizon.
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