Research Casts Doubt About Life On Mars

Organic chemicals found in a Martian rock may be contamination from Earth and not evidence of life on the Red Planet, new studies suggest.

But scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration say the reports “don’t shake our belief one bit.”

Laboratory studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography conclude that amino acids and carbon found in a rock from Mars probably got there after the rock landed on Earth and lay on antarctic ice for thousands of years.

This disputes a theory by two NASA scientists who found evidence that Martian microbes once lived inside the rock and left behind fossillike blobs and organic chemicals.

“Neither paper changes our original hypothesis,” said Everett K. Gibson Jr., a NASA researcher. “They don’t shake our belief one bit.”

Gibson and David S. McKay, both of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, announced in August 1996 that they had found evidence of life in a meteorite from Mars. The rock, called ALH84001, was found in an ice field in Antarctica and has been identified chemically as originating from Mars.