[troutman]

In hindsight, did VIKING missions actually discover organic material on Mars?

http://www.planetary.org/radio/show/00000429/

Almost thirty-five years ago, two sophisticated Mars landers appeared to find no evidence of organic compounds on Mars. The discovery of perchlorates by the Phoenix lander in 2008 led to new evidence that organics, the most basic building blocks of life, do exist on the surface of the red planet.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40910966...-discoverycom/

"Contrary to 30 years of perceived wisdom, Viking did detect organic materials on Mars," planetary scientist Christopher McKay, with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News. "It's like a 30-year-old cold case suddenly solved with new facts."

"Finding organics is not evidence of life or evidence of past life. It's just evidence for organics," he said.

But if NASA had realized there were organics on Mars, there might not have been a 20-year hiatus in sending landers for follow-up studies, said Rafael Navarro-González, with the Institute of Nuclear Science at the National Autonomous University in Mexico.

NASA plans to launch a follow-up mission to look for organics on Mars in November.

The research appears in last month's Journal of Geophysical Research.