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NASA Mars Space Science

NASA May Have Discovered and Then Destroyed Organics on Mars in 1976 (space.com) 70

Posted by msmash from the blast-from-the-past dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Over 40 years ago, a NASA mission may have accidentally destroyed what would have been the first discovery of organic molecules on Mars, according to a report from New Scientist. Recently, NASA caused quite a commotion when it announced that its Curiosity rover discovered organic molecules -- which make up life as we know it -- on Mars. This followed the first confirmation of organic molecules on Mars in 2014. But because small, carbon-rich meteorites so frequently pelt the Red Planet, scientists have suspected for decades that organics exist on Mars.

But researchers were stunned in 1976, when NASA sent two Viking landers to Mars to search for organics for the first time and found absolutely none. Scientists didn't know what to make of the Viking findings -- how could there be no organics on Mars? "It was just completely unexpected and inconsistent with what we knew," Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, told New Scientist.
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NASA May Have Discovered and Then Destroyed Organics on Mars in 1976 More

NASA May Have Discovered and Then Destroyed Organics on Mars in 1976

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  • Please mention how the organics were destroyed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kriston ( 7886 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @11:24PM (#56932860) Homepage Journal

    Kind suggestion for Slashdot editors: please mention how the organics were destroyed in the lede. You say they were destroyed but you don't say how.

    • This story was generated automatically, obviously. AI’s not perfect yet. Give it some time.

      • This story was generated automatically, obviously. AI’s not perfect yet. Give it some time.

        So we are using AI to find life now? Interesting...

        • Intelligent-life finding AI was pointed towards slashdot.org and its results recorded. The results came back negative.

    • Re:Please mention how the organics were destroyed (Score:5, Funny)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @11:38PM (#56932904)

      Kind suggestion for Slashdot editors: please mention how the organics were destroyed in the lede. You say they were destroyed but you don't say how.

      In addition to organics, NASA also expected any landers arriving at Mars to encounter hostile aliens armed with ray guns. In order to counter this threat, they equipped the landers with short range molecular disruptors.

      Unfortunately, even though no aliens immediately appeared, a software glitch activated the disruptors. This disintegrated most of the matter within 10 meters of the landers, including the soil samples.

    • Re: Please mention how the organics were destroyed (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @11:40PM (#56932916)

      The viking's spectrometer had to heat the soil. We more recently discovered perchlorate in the mars soil. Its speculated the heat ignited the perchlorate and burned away the organic material. Viking did find chlorobenzene in the soil, which would support that theory, but is not conclusive.

    • Re:Please mention how the organics were destroyed (Score:5, Funny)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @11:55PM (#56932942)

      Kind suggestion for Slashdot editors: please mention how the organics were destroyed in the lede. You say they were destroyed but you don't say how.

      They did mention it, but that part got destroyed during posting. They were going to mention that, but were afraid of kicking off an infinite edit loop.

      [ Editing can be a dangerous life -- but you don't learn that in editing school. ]

    • Re:Please mention how the organics were destroyed (Score:5, Informative)

      by burningcpu ( 1234256 ) on Thursday July 12, 2018 @01:20AM (#56933070)
      Chemist here.

      The author of the article is clearly a journalism major...

      OK, NASA wanted to know whether 'life' was present on Mars. How do we test for 'life?' Well, their approach was to look for stuff that looks like what life on Earth looks like. Mostly, carbon containing, large molecules. Amino acids maybe.

      To test for these compounds, they sent a GC/MS, which is a gas chromatograph attached to a mass spectrum analyzer. The GC/MS does a few things -- the chromatography column separates compounds based primarily on boiling point (sort of), and the quadropole (mass analyzer) determines the mass to charge ratio of the charged species, separated by the GC.

      Well, not all compounds can 'fly' in a GC. Many 'blow apart' / fragment to such an extent that the 'molecular ion' / parent species is not detected, but rather, only reaction products.

      That is sort of what is being proposed here. In order to analyze only the 'volatile' portions of the soil, the soil was slowly heated and the gas that evolved were measured via the GC/MS. This is a standard approach. However, one must always consider a deeper view of the data, and that includes knowing the sample, and what other interferences may be present.

      In this case, perchlorate, an acid, was already present in the samples. Perchlorate is a voracious digestor of carbon containing (highly saturated) bonds. The process of heating up the sample would likely have caused a reaction between any large 'organics' in the sample, and the perchlorate that was already present. In which case, reaction products of the perchlorate and 'organics' would be detected - and according to this article - one such product was detected.

      However, this small molecule, chlorobenzene, may have come from the manufacturing process of the rover and would not have been a noteworthy detection, had it not possibly indicated perchlorate digestion.

      People feel real good about GC/MS data because of the MS...but they forget the sample introduction part.

      Garbage in, garbage out. Like everything.

      • This is a pretty good summary.

        Remember, the Viking lander experiments were designed to work on a planet that no-one had been to before. We expected some solid carbon from meteorites, which ought to be pretty inert even when wartmed. We might hope for a sign of organic (that's chemical organic, though it could be life too). The perchlorates under the surface were a total surprise to everyone. So, it's not the case that the people who designed the experiments were (a) fools and should be fired, or (b) geni

      • ...they thought they had discovered evidence of actual life...not just organics.

        NASA had three separate experiment modules on the Viking lander. One of them was a labelled release (LR) experiment that worked by collecting Martian soil and adding a drop of liquid water that contained nutrients and radioactive carbon atoms. The experiment was that if the soil contained microbes those microbes would metabolize the water with nutrients and release either radioactive carbon dioxide or methane gas which would

      • The author of the article is clearly a journalism major...

        The author of the article is a public health major. Her bio's right there at the bottom of the page.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The powerful rocket the humans used on Mars.
    • They were destroyed by the clickbait headline.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • This is a pretty terrible article summary and the headline is absurdly hyperbolic. The original design of the Viking experiments was always going to, quite intentionally *destroyed" organic molecules, and in fact, any actual life that existed, at some point. The fact that perchlorates were later discovered, completely unexpectedly, was a wild card that absolutely no one predicted at the time, nor was it a reasonable thing to have imagined.

    The headline sounds like it was written by a 12

    • The headline sounds like it was written by a 12-year-old

      In slashdot terms, that's a fucking compliment.

    • The headline sounds like it was written by a 12-year-old

      Really? I was more under the impression it was written by someone who doesn't care at all.

  • Absolute garbage, even reading the /. blurb is insulting.

  • There's iron in blood, and there's iron in rust. That's part of life as we know it. No one got excited about that.

    Big deal. They found atoms are part of the same table of the elements everywhere?

    So what?

  • NASA blinded themselves with Science!

  • Dr. Gilbert V. Levin's "Labeled Release (LR)" [gillevin.com] experiment on the Viking had positive results. He has published in peer reviewed journals analysis on why the results indicate life. He was interviewed on The Space Show [thespaceshow.com] last year
  • Seriously, what was NASA thinking? You don't send two Vikings somewhere and expect them to not kill and plunder. Since there's nothing to plunder on Mars, it kind of narrows their options for things to do.

  • This came out years ago. It was already known there was a flaw in the Viking's instruments that over heated the samples and burned out any evidence.

  • does not prove anything...el stupido

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