Killing Martians
Published on Jan 8, 2007 at 12:58 am.
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Filed under astrobiology, conference blogging.
Astronomers generally think of the dark matter findings that I just blogged about as some of the more important news from Sunday’s meeting. I checked the CNN web site to see if they had anything on it, but instead they had this.
When the Viking Landers landed on Mars in the 1970’s in the first US exploration of the Martian surface, they had some rather crude experiments designed to try to detect life. Most of the experiments gave a negative result. One gave some peculiar findings that almost all planetary geologists take to be chemical activity in the Martian soil rather than biological activity. More so, in fact, because the activity did not continue, as would be expected from Mars life, but ended as you’d expect if it were simply a soil reaction. Once the chemicals were used up, the reaction was over.
Well, Dirk Schulze-Makuch (Washington State University) and J. M. Houtkooper (Justus-Liebig University, Germany) presented a short talk that suggests that perhaps Martian life has slightly different chemistry than Earth life, using H2O2 rather than H2O in their bodies, since such an adaptation might permit them to survive at lower temperatures. If so, then perhaps the Viking experiments killed the Martian microbes.  This isn’t at all clear that it would yield the Viking data. But, it is one, albeit somewhat far fetched, explanation for what was seen.
I had really wanted to hear this talk, but I walked in near the end of it. I had been listening to one of the dark matter talks. As I said just a couple posts ago, there are too many talks going on at the same time to hear them all!
-Astroprof
