Mars and Chile

In an interesting bit of investigative work, an international research team was able to recreate the results of a Martian soil test using Chilean sand from the Atacama desert.

The upshot is that the initial test performed by the Viking spacecraft in 1976 may have led to a "false negative" when ruling out the presence of organic material on Mars - but until we go back and run more tests, we can't know for sure.

Posted by Dan on November 11, 2003 at 12:14 PM | TrackBack