Life on Mars? We may have found it – and killed it
`We may have already encountered Martian life about 30 years ago and accidentally killed it, according to a new analysis of NASA’s Viking mission to Mars presented Sunday at a major astronomy conference in Seattle. [..]
Schulze-Makuch and Houtkooper suggest that the hydrogen peroxide detected by Viking could have come from killing Martian microbes that, like some peculiar creatures on Earth, use hydrogen peroxide the same way humans use water.
The Mars landers did all their chemical analyses by mixing samples with water — a step that would have prompted a powerful chemical reaction in any microbe full of hydrogen peroxide, killing it and releasing the peroxide.’
