Viking Found Organics on Mars, Experiment Confirms!

So organic materials..... LIFE on Mars! After 30 years the confirm comes to light from NASA laboratories. The NASA boffins after deep analysis have found organic compound on Mars soil! This is a great news. Accepted Notion of Mars as Lifeless Is Challenged! A change of paradigm! The sad side: Thirty Years!!
Here en.wikipedia.org... the Viking Biological Experiments

The Viking Biological Package



news.discovery.com...

More than 30 years after NASA's Viking landers found no evidence for organic materials on Mars, scientists say a new experiment on Mars-like soil shows Viking did, in fact, hit pay dirt. The new study was prompted by the August 2008 discovery of powerful oxygen-busting compounds known as perchlorates at the landing site of another Mars probe called Phoenix.

Contrary to 30 years of perceived wisdom, Viking did detect organic materials on Mars," planetary scientist Christopher McKay, with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News. "It's like a 30-year-old cold suddenly solved with new facts."

Scientists repeated a key Viking experiment using perchlorate-enhanced soil from Chile's Atacama Desert, which is considered one of the driest and most Mars-like places on Earth, and found telltale fingerprints of combusted organics -- the same chemicals Viking scientists dismissed as contaminants from Earth.

BUT

New evidence for organics on Mars does not mean Viking found life, cautions McKay. "Finding organics is not evidence of life or evidence of past life. It's just evidence for organics," he said.

BWTH!

Maybe NASA boffins would change the LIFE paradigm? en.wikipedia.org...

Organics found in 1976 by the Phoenix lander...

Popsci article:

Interesting.
And I don't understand why NASA tones this down, but boasts about creating arsenic life in a lab here on earth...


They do enjoy being financed, right?

That company makes no sense to me

reply to post by Arken
Isn't this news a couple of months old and based on tests from the first half of last year? Tests that are indicative and not conclusive?

The article is slightly leading in that until the next Mars Mission takes place to test the hypothesis, it remains unconfirmed.

By sheer bloody-minded coincidence the next rover is scheduled to hit Mars dirt in...August 2012. If life is confirmed on our red cousin, no doubt the 2012 industry will justify itself and continue to peddle moonshine and BS into the future.

Originally posted by Arken
So organic materials..... LIFE on Mars!

While this is very exciting and thank you for finding this (S&F applied), please note that finding organic compounds does not automatically mean they found life. Please ensure you understand the definition of 'organic' in the correct context:

organic - (relating or belonging to the class of chemical compounds having a carbon basis) "hydrocarbons are organic compounds"

wordnetweb.princeton.edu...

reply to post by AgentSmith


Thanks for that.

But (for exemple) methane is a hydrocarbons?
Yes it is. Methane is a hydrocarbon because it is composed only of the elements carbon and hydrogen. It has the formula CH4.
But this new experiment is not on that kind of quest.

Methane, infact, it is yet discovery on Mars, and in huge ammount.

reply to post by Arken


I would also think that there are more than a handful of "off the books" mars projects going on at the moment.by a few different countries.
Maybe some are tunnelling the martian ground,and some are orbiting-But I bet there are a few secret missions by now.

I think we will eventually be told of some ancient life on Mars,prepping us up for the final declaration that we are originally from over there,via panspermia.

The methane is interesting too,if that turns out to be real it could be very important in terms of life of some kind on Mars.

reply to post by Arken


Its definitely a step in the right direction.. On the conspiracy theory side of things is another step towards the ET phone home moment. Maybe not, but we can dream...

Nice find S and F

Originally posted by SaturnFX
Interesting.
And I don't understand why NASA tones this down, but boasts about creating arsenic life in a lab here on earth...


They do enjoy being financed, right?

That company makes no sense to me

Me Too, SaturnFX.

I really don't understand why NASA don't emphatize this discovery.

A really strange behaviour.

Maybe NASA boffins are waiting more funds for their black projects, or maybe this discovery is slipped out?

I wander: Methane, Water, Oxigen, Ice..... and now organic compounds.....on Mars.

What NASA is still waiting?

GODOT!?

No, money.

Most people can't wrap their mind around the idea that NASA is a small agency that is poorly-funded for what the public expects from them. The US Office of Personnel Management has three times the budget NASA does, yet nobody expects spectacular breakthroughs or pretty pictures from them (for that matter, I have no idea what they are supposed to do).

To make the budget situation worse, NASA isn't even a monolithic organization: It is a confederation of several "centers" with different areas of expertise. Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California develops and controls unmanned probes (such as the Mars landers, Voyagers, etc.), Greenbelt Maryland controls the Hubble, Johnson Space Center in Houston trains astronauts and controls manned missions, Kennedy Space Center in Florida does the launches and refurbishes the Shuttle after each flight. Then you have the Marshall Space Center in Alabama that builds hardware such as Space Station modules, etc. Stennis Center in Mississippi tests rocket engines, then you've got Glenn Center in Ohio, Langley Reasearch Center in Virginia, Ames, Dryden... You get the picture.

The thing is, these centers have to compete with each other for funding. When you read about a scientist saying "unmanned probes can do more than manned space missions", you can bet he works with JPL, and he's irked that JSC, MSC & KSC are spending money on a single shuttle flight that could fund several planetary probes.

It is telling that it took 30 years to get an experiment package to Mars to follow-up on the preliminary Viking results. Thanks to Nixon and subsequent administrations, the US Space program basically collapsed in the 1970s. There were no manned flights for six years (1975-81), our space station (Skylab) was abandoned and fell out of orbit, there were no missions to the outer planets for 15 years and no Mars landers for 20.

A lot of what NASA has been doing in the last 10-15 years has been relearning how to build and fly reliable probes. Contrary to popular expectation, space probes are not built in a factory; they are hand-made in a lab, with parts individually fabricated in adjoining tool shops. Much of that expertise was lost when NASA collapsed. The engineers, technicians (artisans, really) either died, retired, or simply moved on to other things. Now, after much struggle we are finally getting good at exploring again... and yet the public, by-and-large, divides itself between two camps: Those who gripe about the slow progress, and those who wonder why we spend money to explore space at all.

reply to post by Saint Exupery


Clear picture. Clear picture.

You are right, about all concerning NASA.

This news if emphatized in the right manner, could give a great spin to obtain more funds for "White NASA" to plan more missions in our Solar System.

The detection of Life is the real purpose of space exploration.

But as we know there are many projects, besides the official ones, that have enough funds. Military and secret projects.
Maybe they already detected signs of life (maybe intelligent) around us.

And this news scares.....

reply to post by Arken


I would not be surprised if some form of current life was found on Mars to be honest, I'm just a stickler for facts
The article you found which confirmed what some have been saying for years is just another exciting step towards a possibly life changing discovery being confirmed. I'm personally very excited by this!

From 2001 article on Space.com of Gilbert Levin www.space.com... The inventor of the Labelled Release Experiment on board VIking

A re-examination of findings relayed to Earth by the probes some 25 years ago, claim the experts, show the tell-tale signs of microbes lurking within the Martian soil.

The LR experiments on both Landers coughed up puffs of radiolabeled gas - evidence for microorganisms in the soil of Mars.

"The Viking LR experiment detected living microorganisms in the soil of Mars," Levin flatly said.

reply to post by Arken


WOW. Thanks Arken....

S/F.

No life in the neighborhood huh???

reply to post by Arken
I emailed Gilbert Levin years ago informing him I had evidence of life in Mars rovers images and went back to find same in Viking images.Congrats,Dr Levin,you found life on Mars.
* Look for the EYES under the chin in the mars photo.See how perfectly round.

Originally posted by Blarneystoner
Organics found in 1976 by the Phoenix lander...

Popsci article:

edit on 4-1-2011 by Blarneystoner because: (no reason given)

Thanks for this.

YES! They found organic compounds on MARS.............. 30 Years Ago..............................

Hush hush!.......
Hush hush!.......
Hush hush!.......
Hush hush!.......
Hush hush!.......
Hush hush!.......

No, the fact that organic substances exist on Mars, after all, does not, in itself, prove that there is life there. However, it was the absence of such substances that caused the *positive* results of the labeled release experiments, intended to detect life, to be disregarded, those 35 years ago. NASA came close to announcing the discovery of life on Mars on 1976. When they failed to detect organics, it was thought impossible that life could exist in their absence. Since they are and were actually present, so too, very probably, is life. Ross

You know what? There is some element of tragedy here IMO - this is like reading some kind of "What if?" story, What if 30 years ago they had announced all this? Would the U.S. REALLY not have sent another mission for 16 years? Would we REALLY have waited 21 years to send another Lander? (true the Russians tried a failed lander but not until 12 years after Viking - so I am doubting that time lag for both Superpowers).

Another "Space Race" this time to Mars could really have been just the thing to kick start if not the whole the whole movement to a Solar System-wide civilization ....which it easily might have if Reagan was racing Breshnev to Olympus Mons .... but certainly we would be way beyond where we are now....

Better late than never, but this makes me feel a little queasy

reply to post by Arken


***

Organic Material is not life.