For the 50th anniversary of the first Mars lander, I brought my Viking artifacts to NASA Ames to share with the Vikings that made it happen.
They audibly gasped when my Viking Lander Biological Instrument (VLBI) was unveiled. Ames managed the VLBI experiments, the first attempt to detect life on another world. The VLBI was the most expensive scientific instrument ever made at the time, a compact package with three custom Martian life-detection experiments + the smallest gas chromatograph mass spectrometer. I happen to have the only complete unit on Earth (the other two made history on Mars).
On July 20, 1976, Viking was the first spacecraft to successfully land and operate on the Martian surface. The mission was a major milestone for NASA, with the Viking 1 lander operating on the Red Planet for over six years. Shortly after touchdown, it made history again by transmitting the first color photographs ever taken from the surface of another planet.
Artifacts in photo, L to R:
1) Production engine from the Viking spacecraft program. Details here
2) Viking Lander engine. I just acquired this one. A very unusual design, it has 18 nozzles from one combustion chamber. This was designed to spread out the thrust to avoid “sandblasting” the landing site since the sample collection arm had to operate at the landing site (no rover here).
3) VLBI… with a revival of excitement for its discoveries of late:
The Vikings: Did we detect a signature of ancient life on Mars in 1976?
TLDR; New Mars surface data found organic salts + perchlorates => something digested carbon in ’76.
With the flotilla of spacecraft investigating Mars, new data keeps coming in, and it might cause us to reevaluate the data from humanity’s first attempt to look for life on another world. It also motivated me to take a closer look at the Viking artifacts I have in the museum at work, including the VLBI, orbiter engine, antenna boom that sent the data back to Earth, and the mission control panels that controlled key parts of the mission. Details in each photo caption.
Back to the big question. After five failed attempts by the Soviet Union, the first successful landers on Mars, Viking 1 and 2, conducted four separate experiments to look for signatures of life in the Martian soil. The GCMS was the most trusted instrument, a technological marvel shrunk from a room-sized instrument at MIT to the size of a hat box that would detect the carbon of carbon-based life forms. The scientists at JPL waited eagerly for its results. And they were heartbreaking. It found no carbon compounds, even less than on the moon!
With no carbon, the GCMS undermined the results of the VLBI experiment that had a positive result: the Labeled Release (LR) experiment showed something metabolizing a radioactive carbon-14 laced nutrient soup fed to the Martian soil, releasing that carbon-14 as CO2. Perhaps you recall the deflating results, popularized in the 70s, of Mars as a lifeless planet.
But some of the VLBI engineers believed that the signature of life had been found… if the GCMS reading was erroneous, and they even had a theory as to why – perchlorate in the soil, heated to high temperatures in the GCMS, could destroy all carbon signatures in the test configuration. Many years later, it was discovered that perchlorate is abundant in the Martian soil, leading some scientists to reverse the conclusions reached in 1976 (including the “Mars Czar” at the time, Scott Hubbard, who spoke with me about this with great excitement).
“The new study of the Viking program’s finding was initiated after the August 2008 discovery of perchlorates in Martian soil by the Phoenix lander. Perchlorates are salts whose powerful oxygen-busting capacity tends to combust organics. The Viking team had no reason at the time to think Martian soil was perchlorate-rich, so the tiny trace chemicals they found in the Viking experiment were dismissed as contaminants from Earth. The new study asserts that they were combusted organic compounds, fingerprints of carbon leftover from contact with perchlorates in the soil. Viking’s failure to find organic compounds was the main argument against sending further missions to Mars to seek them” — Pop Sci.
"The designer of the VLBI-LR experiment, Gilbert Levin, believes the positive LR results are diagnostic for life on Mars. According to Levin and Patricia Ann Straat, investigators of the LR experiment, no explanation involving inorganic chemistry as of 2016 is able to give satisfactory explanations of the complete data from the LR experiment" — Wikipedia
And then, in 2018, the Curiosity rover found myriad organic molecules at the surface (counter to the Viking CGMS finding), and long-term atmospheric sampling found “low levels of methane within Gale Crater repeatedly peak in warm, summer months and drop in the winter every year.”
And now, in 2021, NASA made an exciting new discovery: “A team of NASA researchers suspect that they’ve made a huge discovery about Mars: organic salts on the surface. If that’s true, then it would lend much more credibility to the hypothesis that Mars once supported life.”
Perhaps it is time to revisit the original data to see if different conclusions might be drawn with different priors. The initial negative prognosis might become enticingly suggestive and motivating for more experiments to come.
• Quote Sources:
www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/salts-could-be-importan…
www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-finds-ancient-organic-mat…
futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-rover-remnants-organic-compoun…
• NASA 50th event page/agenda: www.nasa.gov/ames/science/viking-50th-anniversary/
• New: unlisted video of whole event at Ames.
• Incredible 3D digital models of the Viking lander made over many years by Tom Dahl: www.youtube.com/c/TomDahl/videos
P.S. I did a video overview of the VLBI and GCMS: youtu.be/4FOF0f70Hoc?t=714 and I even checked it out with a Geiger counter (the thoriated magnesium was the only mildly radioactive part, in the GCMS).
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