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From: Karl Brown <karl.brown@...>
Sent: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 09:16:30 +1100
To: catodon@...
Subject: Fwd: Viking found life on Mars, then killed it with water?


>Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 14:10:29 +1100
>From: Liz Bowman <ebowman@...>
>Subject: Viking found life on Mars, then killed it with water?
>To: Karl Brown <karl.brown@...>
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>but may have killed it with water.  I bet Larry Niven is getting a
>lot of email forwards at the moment...
>
>http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200701/s1823896.htm
>
>Viking probes may have found life on Mars, say researchers
>
>NASA's Viking Mars probes may have found living organisms when they
>landed on Mars 30 years ago, but possibly destroyed them by exposing
>them to water, according to two astrobiologists.
>
>"I think the Viking results have been a little bit neglected in the
>last 10 years or more," Dirk Schulze-Makuch told the American
>Astronomical Society meeting from the weekend through to Wednesday in
>Seattle, Washington.
>
>"But actually, we got a lot of data there and recent findings about
>Earth organisms that live in extreme environments, and improvements
>in our understanding of conditions on Mars, give astrobiologists new
>ways of looking at the 30-year-old data," from the probes, he added.
>
>The scientist and his colleague Joop Houtkooper of Justus-Liebig-
>University, Giessen, Germany, have published their findings on the
>website of Washington State University, where Mr Schulze-Makuch teaches.
>
>The researchers hypothesise that Mars is home to microbe-like
>organisms that use a mixture of water and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) as
>their internal fluid.
>
>Such a mixture would provide at least three clear benefits to
>organisms in the cold and dry Martian environment, said Mr Schulze- Makuch.
>
>Its freezing point is as low as minus 56.5 degrees Celsius, depending
>on the concentration of H2O2; and H2O2 is hygroscopic, which means it
>attracts water vapour from the atmosphere, a valuable trait on a
>planet where liquid water is rare, the scientist added.
>
>On Earth, some microbes in the soil tolerate elevated concentrations
>of H2O2 in their surroundings, and the species Acetobacter peroxidans
>use hydrogen peroxide in its metabolism.
>
>Scientists working on the Viking project in the 1970s were not
>looking for organisms that rely on H2O2, because at the time nobody
>was aware that such organisms could exist.
>
>Research of "extremphiles," organisms capable of adapting to extreme
>environments such as volcanic fumaroles at the ocean bottom, did not
>take off until the 1990s.
>
>Mr Schulze-Makuch and Mr Houtkooper also explained how the
>experiments carried aboard the two Viking probes may have
>inadvertently killed any living organisms Martian soil may have
>contained.
>
>They said the soil samples collected on the Red Planet were exposed
>to water which would be make microbes using a water-hydrogen peroxide
>mixture "either drown or burst" due to water absorption.
>
>They said the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Phoenix
>mission to Mars scheduled to launch in August 2007 offers a good
>chance to further explore their hypothesis.
>
>-AFP
>


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