In an old experiment, Viking landers added water to soil samples from Mars. It might have been a bad idea, here’s why
In the mid-1970s, NASA sent two Viking landers to the surface of Mars. They were equipped with instruments that allowed the only experiments ever conducted on another planet. The results of these tests were already confusing at the time and still are today. At the time, scientists had very little knowledge. Given that Earth is a water-rich planet, it seemed reasonable that adding water could cause life to emerge in the extremely dry Martian environment. In hindsight, it’s possible that that approach was wrong.
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The results of the Viking experiment on Mars
On Earth there are microbes that live inside salt rocks. These organisms exploit a process called hygroscopicityby which they attract water directly from the humidity of the air. For this reason, the microbes living inside the salt rocks of the Atacama (Chile) do not need rain, but only a certain amount of humidity in the atmosphere.
Now let’s ask ourselves what would happen if you poured water on these microbes. Would they die? In technical terms we would say that we are overhydratingbut in simple terms it would be like drowning them. It would be like if you found yourself wandering half-dead in the desert and your would-be saviors decided, “Human beings need water. Let’s put the man in the middle of the ocean to save him!” That wouldn’t work either. Many involved applying water to soil samples, which could explain the negative results in the search for microbial life on Mars. Perhaps the alleged Martian microbes collected for the experiments couldn’t handle that amount of water and died after a while.
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