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Asked by hazza1999 to Adam, Leila, Catherine, Karen, Nazim on 11 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by f16harley, olives, marcusw, purplebug123, buddingscientist.
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Leila Battison answered on 10 Mar 2012:
Personally? No, but I’m working on it!
Lots of experiments have been designed that will look for life on Mars, but none of them have come back with any definite answers yet.
The first was the Viking lander in 1976, which did some chemistry to see if there were bacteria in the Martian soil. Some of those experiments had positive results, but others showed there to be no life, so scientists were a bit confused and put it down to some weird unexpected chemistry.
Scientists thought they had found bacteria fossils in a meteorite fossil that came from Mars in 1996, and Bill Clinton, the president then, made an announcement on TV. But the fossils they thought they found were too small to be bacteria, and all of the other evidence was shown to be wrong in a few years after the announcement.
High resolution pictures from orbiters around mars are continually taking pictures of places where life might be hiding – in clay in the bottom of craters, in caves underneath the surface, or in the warm ground near the dormant volcanoes. The latest Mars mission (called Curiosity, or the Mars Science Lab), will land on Mars in August, and will go specifically to look for life. So watch this space!
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Adam Stevens answered on 10 Mar 2012:
Not personally (yet!), and no one has found definite evidence for life on Mars yet. There are hints of evidence, but they aren’t conclusive.
There was a but of a hoo-ha a while ago when people said they’d found some fossilised bugs in a meteorite that came from Mars. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001)
Lots of controversy came out of this, which was a shame as it ended up with some scientists being a bit nasty to other ones, but it raised a lot of interesting points.
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Catherine Rix answered on 11 Mar 2012:
Not yet, but I am looking! I’m part of a team who are going to send an experiment to Mars in 2018 to look for evidence of life. Mars today is a pretty inhospitable planet so we think that there probably isn’t any life there today, but that there might have been in the past. The Life Marker Chip, which is the experiment I’m working on, is going to look for molecules that are evidence of current life, and anchient extinct life in martian rocks and soils, so watch this space!
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Karen Masters answered on 11 Mar 2012:
Not personally no! 😉
Mars is exciting though – it, and perhaps some of the Moons of the outer gas giants are the only locations in the solar system other than Earth that we think it just might be possible for life to exist. I really hope we find evidence of it in my life time – that would be amazing.
There was a big fuss a few years ago over some scientists who thought they found signs of life (fossilized) in a Martian meteorite. You can read what NASA has to say about that here http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/marslife.html This has not been generally accepted – although not disproved either to my knowledge! Exciting huh! 😉
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