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Mars-Like Atacama Desert Could Explain Viking 'No Life' Results
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Ron Baalke wrote: ...said McKay, who noted that the team did discover a non-biological oxidative substance that appears to have reacted with the organics -- results that mimicked Viking's results. I finally got around to reading that issue of Science, and found this paper most interesting. The press release plays up the sterility of the soil, which is indeed remarkable, and the high temperatures needed to release what slight traces of organics are present, but it has only that one passing allusion to what is (to my mind) the most important finding: there is some kind of non-biological oxidant in the soil! The exact nature of the oxidant is undetermined -- interestingly enough, chemical tests for the obvious candidates (and the ones that have been proposed for the Martian surface) all came up negative -- but there is something in there that's roughly duplicating what Gil Leven's Labeled Release experiment did on Mars. And it would appear to be non-biological, because it doesn't care whether the glucose it chews up is right-handed (normal for Earth life) or left-handed, whereas bacteria eat only the right-handed glucose. -- MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. | |
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