WASHINGTON, DC: A scientist has reportedly said that NASA may have found signs of life on Mars after sending its first two Viking landers five decades ago. However, it also probably killed it accidentally.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch, who teaches at the Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Technical University Berlin, made these claims in his piece written for BigThink.

What did Dirk Schulze-Makuch say about the Mars finding?

Schulze-Makuch shared, “In the mid-1970s, NASA sent two Viking landers to the surface of Mars equipped with instruments that conducted the only life detection experiments ever conducted on another planet.”

He continued, “While some of them [results of experiments] — particularly the labeled release experiment (which tested for microbial metabolism) and the pyrolytic release experiments (which tested for organic synthesis) — were initially positive for life, the gas exchange experiment was not.”

Explaining further about the mission carried out in 1975, the researcher suggested that at the time, scientists were not very aware of the Red Planet’s environment.

He mentioned, “Since Earth is a water planet, it seemed reasonable that adding water might coax life to show itself in the extremely dry Martian environment.” However, there are high chance that the “approach was too much of a good thing” and it backfired.

Did water kill alien life on Mars?

Schulze-Makuch, who is also an Adjunct Professor at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Washington State University, Pullman, wrote in his op-ed piece that there are several things present on Earth that do not need water but “just a certain amount of moisture in the atmosphere”.

Similarly, life on Mars may have gotten “hyperhydrated” because of the water. To make his point clearer, Schulze-Makuch also gave an example.

He said, “It would be as if an alien spaceship were to find you wandering half-dead in the desert, and your would-be saviors decide, ‘Humans need water. Let’s put the human in the middle of the ocean to save it!’ That wouldn’t work either.”

Schulze-Makuch also revealed, “Many of the Viking experiments involved applying water to the soil samples, which may explain the puzzling results,” before adding, “Perhaps the putative Martian microbes collected for the labeled release experiments couldn’t deal with that amount of water and died off after a while.”