Download Martian Life: The NASA Cover-Up

Martian Life: The NASA Cover-Up?
NASA has always denied that its Viking spacecraft discovered Life on Mars in 1976. But the truth
may be very different…
by Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest
It's an unlikely place to be searching for evidence for life on Mars, we reflect, as we pull up at a light
industrial estate in Beltsville, Maryland. Anonymous portakabin-style offices dot the flat landscape,
enlivened by vigorous metal sculptures made from industrial spare parts.
On finding the right unit, a tall, gangly man in his seventies ushers us into the conference room. He is
driven; he still has fire in his belly. "I'm Gil Levin, founder, President and CEO of Biospherics
Incorporated. I was also a member of the Viking spacecraft team. On Viking, I was an investigator on the
Labelled Release experiment. That's the one that got a positive indication for life on Mars - and has kept
me in trouble ever since".
The dispute dates back to July 1976, when the first Viking lander settled down on the dusty-pink world
with its salmon-pink skies. But there was nothing rosy about the Red Planet. It was bitterly cold, and
almost airless. Drifts of fine Martian soil stretched for miles, as powdery as Antarctic snow. Rocks and
boulders of all shapes and sizes littered the scene. Many were rough and volcanic in appearance, and
some had small holes where gas had once bubbled through - like pumice.
The Viking 2 mission arrived at Mars a couple of months after its twin, and both landers continued to
perform flawlessly for many years. Each returned weekly weather reports, analyses of the Martian
atmosphere, wind-speed readings, and thousands of pictures of the surface of Mars in all its moods.
Stunning though the images undoubtedly were, it was the life experiments that captured the imagination
of the world. Each lander carried a miniature laboratory, the size of a wastepaper basket, to perform the
life-detection experiments on the surface by remote control. Nothing as sophisticated had ever flown to
another world.
With its 10-foot-long arm, each Viking lander fed soil samples into its laboratory to be tested. There were
four main experiments. Three looked at biological or chemical reactions with the soil, and one - the
GCMS - broke down the soil into its basic atoms.
Two of the experiments gave negative or inconclusive results. Any reactions that took place, agreed the
researchers, were down to chemistry rather than biology. But the third experiment had everyone sitting up
and taking a considerable amount of notice. It was the Labelled Release experiment of 'sanitary engineer'
Gil Levin.
CREDIT: Hencoup Enterprises
Lift-off of Viking 2 atop a Titan/Centaur launch vehicle on 9th
September, 1975
Levin explains his technique. "It's
very simple. The standard method of
culturing micro-organisms is to put
them in some kind of nutrient soup,
and wait several days until they start
multiplying and you can see them.
My technique simply added
radioisotopes to those nutrient
compounds. This meant that as
soon as the micro-organisms started
metabolising them, they would
expire radioactive gas - which would
be detected much more quickly than
waiting around for a visible bubble.
So the whole thing reduced about
two days of waiting for evidence of life to about 15 or 30 minutes".
Geologist Mike Carr recalls the feeling in the Control Room when Levin's experiment yielded up copious
quantities of radioactive gas. "I mean, we initially thought, my God, my God - there may be life there. And
then, of course, it all kind of waned".
Ever since then, NASA's official line on the Labelled Release experiment is that it, too, discovered
chemistry rather than biology. But Gil Levin absolutely refuses to take this assessment lying down.
His problems with NASA started, he explains, long before Viking even flew. "My problem is that I'm an
engineer. I'm an engineer in a small company, and when my experiment began to work, NASA called me
down and said, we have a problem. It looks as though your experiment might be selected - it looks awful
damn good - and you're just an engineer. What's more, you don't have a Ph.D. - so how can you, if
successful, go and talk to the National Academy of Sciences, go abroad to distinguished universities and
report? So we want you to take on a senior investigator, and he will report it".
"I absolutely refused, and said, I'm not going to give up this experiment. I'll go get myself a Ph.D. So I
went to school and I worked - did both full-time for three years - took all the sciences and got my Ph.D in
engineering".
After the Viking landing, everything seemed to bode well for Levin's experiment. He recalls the excitement
in Mission Control at the time. "When my experiment came up - it was about 7.30 at night - the results
clattered out of the computer, and we saw this curve and were amazed. We'd tested the Labelled
Release experiment hundreds of times on Earth, with thousands of different micro-organisms. We knew
what those curves of response looked like, and here was one staring us in the face. We were astounded,
and I sent out for a bottle of champagne".
CREDIT: Hencoup Enterprises
This panoramic view of Mars was the first picture taken by the Viking 1
Lander on 23rd July 1976. The large rock (centre) was dubbed 'Big
Bertha' - but later renamed 'Big Joe' after howls of protest from
feminists.
No experiment can be
validated without controls,
so Levin's team decided
to 'kill off the bugs' in their
sample by heating it to
160 degrees. "We waited,
and finally the computer
started spitting out again",
recounts Levin. "There
was zilch. A flat control
line".
But Levin's problems
were just about to start. Results from the GCMS experiment began to come in shortly afterwards. It found
many familiar chemical elements - including iron, silicon and oxygen. But there was absolutely no trace of
carbon - the basic building block of life. How could Levin's experiment have detected life if there was no
organic matter on Mars to make it?
Worse was to come. As geologist Bruce Jakosky observes, Mars must be kept topped up by carbon from
meteorites. "You find organics on the Moon from meteorites. So something must be breaking apart the
organics on Mars. The suggestion that's been pretty much accepted is that there must be oxidising
agents, like hydrogen peroxide, in the Martian soil that would attack the organics and break them apart".
We go over this ground with Gil Levin. He takes some papers out of a filing cabinet, and places a
computer print-out on the table. To our eyes, the Mars data does not look like a chemical reaction.
Chemical activity builds rapidly, then dies away. But the Martian curve builds steadily, and looks identical
to his terrestrial controls.
Levin had one last-ditch attempt to convince NASA that he was onto something. He decided to heat
samples of Mars soil within a narrow range of temperatures - the range of temperatures that kill off
bacteria on the Earth. "First of all, we showed that 51 degrees definitely destroyed the signal. But
secondly, we showed that 46 degrees didn't destroy it - it inhibited it by 30 percent. And that's just the way
that in the laboratory here we distinguish E. coli from the rest of the coliforms, because E. coli can survive
beyond 37 degrees, while the others cannot".
It was all to no avail. NASA had turned its collective back on Levin. "It was
political", he acknowledges. "They had to come down with a decision, and they
hate to retract a decision. If you go to people from NASA and you say, what do
you think of the Labelled Release Experiment, they'll say - oh, that's garbage
you know. Levin keeps saying the same thing over and over again".
"In 1986, I was asked to speak at the tenth anniversary of Viking, and what I did
was list, oh, maybe fifteen possible explanations of a non-biological nature for
the Labelled Release Experiment results - and I showed errors in each one of
those. And for the very first time, I said, it's my opinion that it's more probable
than not that the Labelled Release Experiment detected life on Mars. There was
an uproar. Since then, I've been essentially ostracised by the NASA-supported
community".
CREDIT: Hencoup Enterprises
But amongst Mars researchers around the world we have felt a tide beginning to
turn - away from the official NASA line. At the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography in La Jolla, California, we spoke to young chemists Danny Glavin
and Oliver Botta. Their field is detecting the chemicals of life - and now they
hope to take their techniques, tried and tested on Earth, to Mars. "We've
recently done some really interesting experiments with this new Mars Organic
Detector, the MOD," Glavin enthuses.
At the Scripps
Institution of
Oceanography, La
Jolla, Danny Glavin
perfects the ultimate
equipment for
discovering the
merest traces of
amino acids - the
building blocks of life.
"What we've shown with the MOD is that you can detect amino acids with very
high sensitivities. And using the detection limits of what the Viking GCMS
measured for these compounds, and comparing it with our instrument, we estimate that Viking would
have missed on the order of thirty million bacteria cells per gramme of soil. So there could have been
cells in the soil, but the Viking GCMS wouldn't have seen them."
Oliver Botta reminds us how much our knowledge about the tenacity of life in extreme environments has
advanced since Viking. "The problem with the biology package on Viking was that it was really designed
to look for terrestrial analogues of life. And we have to realise that, in the Seventies, we didn't know of the
variety of lifeforms we have on Earth - high temperature, low temperature, and high acid, or whatever".
Extremophile expert Jonathan Trent of NASA's Ames Research Center can even contemplate life in an
environment of hydrogen peroxide. "Cells on Earth have wonderful adaptations for getting rid of peroxide.
For example, there's an enzyme called catalase. When you have a wound, and put peroxide on to
sterilise it, the peroxide will bubble. The catalase is transforming the peroxide into water and oxygen, and
the bubbles are actually oxygen coming off. Many organisms produce catalase, and it isn't inconceivable
that they could cope with the peroxide levels on the surface of Mars".
So where does the jury stand these days on the Viking life findings?
David Wynn-Williams is a geologist at the British Antarctic Survey.
"When Gil Levin evaluated his system in the Antarctic, he was able to
show biological activity at very low densities of micro-organisms. So
he's partly right - the GCMS was not as sensitive as his system, but I
need more evidence to be convinced that he did actually see
microbiological activity on Mars".
CREDIT: Hencoup Enterprises
Danny Glavin (left) and Oliver
Botta check out samples of
meteorites for organic
molecules: they hope similar
equipment will discover the
materials of life on Mars.
'Mr. Mars', NASA-Ames's Chris McKay adds: " If Gil's experiment was
the only experiment we had, its results would be consistent with a
biological source. But it was inconsistent with the other experiments.
Explanations relying on a chemical reaction with the soil are more
plausible, but I should say that none of these explanations have been
proven".
NASA's John Rummel remembers how Viking's non-detection of life
cast a shadow over the Agency. "When I first got to Headquarters with
the odour of what was assumed to be a negative result on Viking,
there were many astrophysicists quite willing to prove to me that life couldn't exist anywhere in the
Universe, including the Earth - and at days in Washington, I agreed with them".
So what is Rummel's verdict on Viking? - "Not proven".
Meanwhile, Gil Levin bides his time. He is heartened by the 'not proven' verdict. But NASA still stonewalls
him, and there are a number of scientists around who doubt his competence. Does he let it get to him?
"I'm not resentful", he smiles. "I'm kind of amused. I do believe that the existence of life on Mars will be
established one day, and I'm sure that when it is established, whoever does it will take the credit."
But - indicating his sheaf of graphs - Levin concludes: "Nonetheless, the original data are there".