Posted: Apr 15, 2012 2:34 am
A new look at the Viking mission data is being reconsidered as possible evidence for Martian life.
From that article:
What is somewhat less well known, incidentally, is that the experiments also pointed tantalisingly toward the existence of a circadian rhythm in the experimental samples - coinciding very neatly with the day length on Mars, which is 24.7 hours.
Of course, we'll need something a little more than this before we can pop any champagne corks and welcome our Martian companions. However, this might just spur NASA or the ESA to put together a mission that answers the question once and for all.
From that article:
Clustering Viking's Mars Data
For the study, Miller and mathematician Giorgio Bianciardi, of Italy's University of Siena, used a technique called cluster analysis, which groups together similar-looking data sets.
"We just plugged all the [Viking experimental and control] data in and said, Let the cluster analysis sort it," Miller said. "What happened was, we found two clusters: One cluster constituted the two active experiments on Viking and the other cluster was the five control experiments."
To bolster their case, the team also compared the Viking data to measurements collected from confirmed biological sources on Earth—for example, temperature readings from a rat—and from purely physical, nonbiological sources.
"It turned out that all the biological experiments from Earth sorted with the active experiments from Viking, and all the nonbiological data series sorted with the control experiments," Miller said. "It was an extremely clear-cut phenomenon."
(Related: "Life on Mars? 'Missing Mineral' Find Boosts Chances.")
The team concedes, however, that this finding by itself isn't enough to prove that there's life on Mars.
"It just says there's a big difference between the active experiments and the controls, and that Viking's active experiments sorted with terrestrial biology and the controls sorted with nonbiological phenomena," Miller said.
What is somewhat less well known, incidentally, is that the experiments also pointed tantalisingly toward the existence of a circadian rhythm in the experimental samples - coinciding very neatly with the day length on Mars, which is 24.7 hours.
Of course, we'll need something a little more than this before we can pop any champagne corks and welcome our Martian companions. However, this might just spur NASA or the ESA to put together a mission that answers the question once and for all.