NASA has found life on Mars but failed to recognise it, a controversial new scientific report claims. An international team looked again at the findings of two spacecraft that landed on the Red Planet 36 years ago.
Sensationally, they conclude that the Viking missions sent back clear evidence for bugs living in the martian soil. Two robotic Viking spacecraft became the first to land on Mars in 1976 and are the only ones to have carried experiments directly to look for life.
One, called the Labeled Release experiment, added nutirents to samples of martian soil, just as a gardener might add plant food to his garden. The soil quickly gave off a large amount of gas, believed to be mainly carbon dioxide. But NASA decided against a biological cause at the time.
Now a team of scientists and mathematicians have carried out a detailed analysis of the data gathered by the experiment and compared it to the results that would be obtained from bug-free soil. They conclude that their findings point to microbes having produced the gas .... Read more at http://www.skymania.com
