Via iNews:
Life found on Mars! Surely it would be the story of the century – except perhaps it was the story of last century and everybody missed it.
That’s the extraordinary claim of Gilbert Levin, the principal investigator of a Nasa experiment that went to Mars in 1976 with the Viking landers.
The Labelled Release (LR) experiment placed liquid nutrients onto Mars soil samples. The idea was that any microorganisms present would consume the food and give off carbon dioxide gas.
“We were astonished to find that we immediately got gas coming out and it continued for the full seven days of the experiment,” says Levin.
Why Levin believes his theory is right
At first, even Levin himself was sceptical that his experiment had found life. He thought that the ultraviolet light penetrating to the surface of Mars was affecting the chemistry of the soil, and priming it to release the carbon dioxide. So he got the spacecraft engineers to move a rock and take a sample of soil from underneath. His results remained the same.
Next, it was suggested that hydrogen peroxide in the atmosphere and surface of Mars was responsible. But Levin investigated the data taken by a previous spacecraft and found no trace of the chemical.