ten after scientists said NASA ’s Mars deputation had found inconclusive evidence of constitutional compounds on Mars , a unexampled study says not only are there organics on Mars , but Viking found them back in the seventies , and scientists completely leave out them .
The new study of the Viking computer programme ’s finding was initiated after the August 2008 uncovering of perchlorate in Martian soil by the Phoenix lander . Perchlorates are salts whose powerful O - busting capacity that tends to combust organics .
The Viking team had no grounds at the fourth dimension to cogitate Martian ground was perchlorate - plentiful , so the midget trace chemicals they found in the Viking experiment were dismissed as contaminants from Earth . The raw study asserts that they were combusted constituent compounds , fingerprint of compounds leftover from link with perchlorate in the soil .

To recreate the experiment , investigator used perchlorate - enhanced grime from the Atacama Desert in Chile , a neighborhood count one of the best Mars analog on Earth . That soil record the same telltale fingerprint of combusted organics that the Viking experiment find oneself , suggesting that the Martian soil also turn back organics .
However , the researchers accentuate that organics are not the same as life ( those stick with astronomy news over the preceding mates of months bed what happens when NASA whips the blogosphere into a fury overrumors of finding signal of lifeelsewhere in the cosmos ) . They are simply organics , which could direct to a good understanding of Mars ’ interpersonal chemistry .
Viking ’s bankruptcy to find organic compound was the main argument against sending further missions to Mars to assay them , which has potentially cost researchers years of enquiry time . luckily , the search for organic on Mars was n’t completely desert ; Mars Science Lab launches in November of this yr , and its legal instrument will resume the study of Martian chemistry , including organic .

[ Discovery News ]
This articleoriginally come out at Popular Science
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