Did we find life on Mars 50 years ago? #shorts

By Dr. Becky

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SO you see a headline like this, “I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s” and you might think “yeah right” said with a very healthy dose of scientific skepticism. But this article is actually written by one of the lead scientists for NASA’s Viking mission that landed on Mars, specifically the lead for an experiment looking for evidence of life. The experiment grabbed some Martian soil and searched for evidence of microbes that eat food and nutrients to survive, like we as humans do, rather than plants that photosynthesise light to survive. So the instrument dripped a "soup" of lots of organic nutrients mixed in with a bunch of radioactive carbon onto some Martian soil. If there were any microbes in the soil they’d eat the nutrients in the radioactive soup, they would then breathe out some radioactive gas, which sensors on the instrument would then pick up. And that’s exactly what they found, a bunch of radioactive gas given off by Martian soil mixed with a nut