http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2009/06/is-there-a-mars-conspiracy.html
Some pesky scientists have just pointed out an appalling design error in NASA’s latest attempts to find life on Mars. This is beginning to look like a conspiracy. Does someone not want us to find life on Mars?
NASA has tried looking for signs of life on Mars precisely once, in the 1976 Viking mission. The result was positive. The reason nobody says there is life on Mars is that another experiment, part of the same mission, couldn’t find any carbon-based “organic” chemicals in Martian soil. This, NASA decided, overruled the other result: with no carbon present, there could be no microbes living on or under the surface of Mars.
Last year, the Phoenix lander repeated the carbon search and failed to find organic molecules. The problem is, we know that there ought to be organic molecules on Mars. Asteroid and comet impacts will have put them there. So what’s going on?
Both of the searches for organic molecules, it turns out, have been deeply flawed. In 2000, the chief engineer on the 1976 experiment finally admitted that his experiment was simply not sensitive enough to overrule anything. Put bluntly, it didn’t work properly – and it never had, even during testing on Earth.
Now a handful of brave NASA scientists have exposed a problem with the latest attempt to pronounce that Mars was dead.
[...]
Gilbert Levin, who ran the 1976 experiment to search for life, the one that got a positive result, thinks it’s all down to a religious conspiracy dating back to the early 1960s. When I was researching my book 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, I travelled to Levin’s Maryland offices and listened to his account of the run-up to Viking. In 1961, he told me, the Executive Director of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, invited him to attend a meeting in Washington. When Levin arrived, he found himself among fifteen of the top scientific minds in the US. None of them knew what the meeting was about until John Olive told them he had been charged by NASA with directing an effort to look for life on other planets.
“Phil Abelson, editor of Science magazine, was sitting next to Dean Cowie, a nuclear physicist,” Levin told me. He grabbed Dean by the arm and audibly said, “Dean, let’s get out of here. The Bible says there can be no life on Mars.”
Please, do read more...NASA has tried looking for signs of life on Mars precisely once, in the 1976 Viking mission. The result was positive. The reason nobody says there is life on Mars is that another experiment, part of the same mission, couldn’t find any carbon-based “organic” chemicals in Martian soil. This, NASA decided, overruled the other result: with no carbon present, there could be no microbes living on or under the surface of Mars.
Last year, the Phoenix lander repeated the carbon search and failed to find organic molecules. The problem is, we know that there ought to be organic molecules on Mars. Asteroid and comet impacts will have put them there. So what’s going on?
Both of the searches for organic molecules, it turns out, have been deeply flawed. In 2000, the chief engineer on the 1976 experiment finally admitted that his experiment was simply not sensitive enough to overrule anything. Put bluntly, it didn’t work properly – and it never had, even during testing on Earth.
Now a handful of brave NASA scientists have exposed a problem with the latest attempt to pronounce that Mars was dead.
[...]
Gilbert Levin, who ran the 1976 experiment to search for life, the one that got a positive result, thinks it’s all down to a religious conspiracy dating back to the early 1960s. When I was researching my book 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, I travelled to Levin’s Maryland offices and listened to his account of the run-up to Viking. In 1961, he told me, the Executive Director of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, invited him to attend a meeting in Washington. When Levin arrived, he found himself among fifteen of the top scientific minds in the US. None of them knew what the meeting was about until John Olive told them he had been charged by NASA with directing an effort to look for life on other planets.
“Phil Abelson, editor of Science magazine, was sitting next to Dean Cowie, a nuclear physicist,” Levin told me. He grabbed Dean by the arm and audibly said, “Dean, let’s get out of here. The Bible says there can be no life on Mars.”
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