NASA has repeatedly stated that its new mission to Mars, Curiosity, carries no life detectors. Yet Gilbert Levin, an experimenter on NASA's 1976 Viking Mission, disagrees. He says instruments aboard the Curiosity rover can confirm his published claim that his Labeled Release (LR) experiment detected living microorganisms on Mars during the Viking mission in 1976.
Levin was the experimenter on the LR instrument that produced evidence of life on Mars. Because another Viking instrument failed to find organic matter, the stuff of life, NASA discounted the LR results. Since the Viking Mission, Mars missions have sought only “evidence” of habitability, not life itself. Levin now claims the organic analyzers and the high-resolution camera on the Curiosity rover can be used to detect life on Mars after it lands in August.
Levin says Curiosity's high-resolution camera may also have the capability to determine whether "lichen-like" colored patches Levin found on rocks at the Viking sites might be living organisms. Levin has contacted Mike Malin, designer of Curiosity's camera, asking him to seek and take high-resolution pictures of any such patches, hoping to determine whether Viking found living organisms on the rocks.
After twenty years of analyzing the LR data, reviewing flaws in Viking's organic detector, and studying new information on life obtained from Mars and Earth, Levin finally announced his "life claim" in a 1997 publication.
In addition, Levin says Viking was sterilized to prevent contaminating Mars with hitchhiking terrestrial microorganisms from Earth. Since then, none of the many NASA and European Space Agency Mars landers, including Curiosity, have been sterilized. Thus, any new findings of life might be questioned as to whether the life was indigenous to Mars or came from Earth. Levin stresses, "The Viking LR life detection data are the only data that will ever be available from a pristine Mars. They are priceless, and should be thoroughly studied."
Levin started his Mars life-seeking efforts in 1958. Funded by NASA, he began developing the LR. In 1969, NASA appointed Levin as team member of the IRIS experiment aboard the 1971 Mariner 9 Mars orbiter.
Following the Viking Mission, Levin was appointed team member of NASA's MOx experiment aboard the Russian '96 Mission to Mars. However, the spacecraft crashed after launch, never reaching Mars.
Today, Levin is a adjunct professor at Arizona State University.
Comments