Soviets Reveal ‘Fixation’ Over Life on Mars
The Soviet Union has rejected the widely held belief that life does not exist on Mars and will make the search for life there a major part of its ambitious exploration of the red planet in the decade ahead.
That revelation came during a four-hour satellite linkup Saturday between Soviet scientists in Moscow and U.S. scientists here, and clearly startled some of the Americans, who believed that the U.S. Viking probes that landed on Mars more than 10 years ago had shown that no life exists on Mars.
During the extraordinary conference, it became clear that the Soviets believe that the Viking spacecraft may have looked in the wrong areas.
“We couldn’t get them off the subject,” said Chris McKay, a biologist with NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., who participated in the conference. “They have a fixation in their minds on life existing on Mars.”
The Soviet participants in the conference repeatedly quizzed American scientists about which areas of the planet they thought would be most likely to sustain life.
Soviet missions scheduled to travel to Mars early in the 1990s will carry devices to bore beneath the surface, searching for microorganisms that may exist below the ground, which resembles the permafrost that blankets northern reaches of the Soviet Union.
About 25 scientists in each location took part in the satellite conference, held at the University of Colorado and sponsored by the Planetary Society of Pasadena. The purpose of the conference, hosted by Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan, was to promote the concept of a joint U.S.-Soviet mission to Mars. That goal was clearly upstaged, however, by discussion of the Soviets’ own plans for a search for life on Mars.
The Soviet Union has previously announced a wide range of ambitious, unmanned missions to Mars during the 1990s, including a spacecraft that would scoop up Martian rocks and return them to Earth for examination.
Major Goal
But few American scientists realized until Saturday that a major goal of that program would be to address again the question of whether life exists on Mars.
Since the Viking probes, which landed in 1976, failed to turn up any evidence of life in two locations on Mars, nearly all U.S. scientists had concluded that if life ever did exist there, it is now extinct. Thus U.S. scientists have leaned heavily toward finding evidence of ancient life that was snuffed out when Mars moved down an evolutionary path that was quite different than the course followed on Earth.
In a sense, U.S. scientists are approaching the question as archeologists, while Soviet scientists are working as biologists.
Although most American scientists who took part in the session said they doubted that the Soviets would be successful, others sided with the Soviets.
“This is probably going to get me banned from ever participating in this kind of program again, but you did not prove there is no life on Mars by Viking,” Carol Stoker of Ames told her fellow scientists.
‘More Interesting Places’
“They (the Soviets) accept the Viking results for what they were,” added Chuck Klein, also of Ames. “They (the Viking probes) showed there is no life in two places. Now, they (the Soviets) are going to go to more interesting places.”
The Viking probes both landed in areas of Mars that were chosen for their benign climate and landscape conditions to enhance the chances that the spacecraft’s delicate instruments would survive touchdown. However, Soviet scientists told their American counterparts during the conference Saturday that those sites were not the most promising in terms of finding life.
Several Soviets, whose comments were not always easily understood over the satellite link, referred repeatedly to the possibility of an “oasis” existing somewhere on Mars. They did not say where such an oasis might be on the planet, but American scientists at the meeting said they suspected the Soviets were referring to Mars’ polar regions, where water is believed to be trapped below the surface in the form of ice.
Martian Rivers
Scientists believe that early in its history, Mars had rivers of water, and that those rivers have long since disappeared.
Current research suggests that life in its most primitive form began on Earth during the planet’s very earliest stages--possibly within the first few hundred million years--and many scientists believe that the same process may have occurred on Mars. Why the process evolved so differently on the two planets, they suggest, could tell much about the evolution, and possibly even the fate, of life on Earth.
Hal Masursky of the U.S. Geological Survey said the Soviets know from their own experiences in frigid regions of the Soviet Union that organisms sometimes thrive below the permafrost.
Nonetheless, few American scientists attending the session here indicated that they thought the Soviets would, indeed, find life on Mars.
“It’s an exciting possibility,” said Ames biologist McKay. “But it’s not very real.”
