Do martian exist?

We may discover resources on the moon or Mars that will boggle the imagination, that will test our limits to dream. And the fascination generated by further exploration will inspire our young people to study math, and science, and engineering and create a new generation of innovators and pioneers.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Since the beginning of aerospace exploration, the red planet has always fascinated us. Wernher Von Braun, known as one of the pioneers of astronautic threw saw a mission that would allow us to visit Mars before the launch of the first space flight, he describes it in his book ''Das Mars Project". He planned to send a team of 70 scientists distributed in a fleet of 10 spacecrafts. He calculated the trajectories and engine types  that would be needed for the trip.

70 years later, thanks to technological advance, we have been able to explore our neighborhood and especially Mars at a very lower cost. Still, a lot of mysteries remain unsolved, one of them "Do martian exist?" 

Even though a big part of "humans" keep believing that there no way Mars could inhabit life (because of their ignorance of the subject or fear), I will expose you some facts that might put the doubt on that.

Even though Mars is the closest planet to Earth, our neighboor is not an easy place to visit.Nearly 40 missions were launched to Mars and more than half of them ended up in failure. In fact, some scientists even refer to "the demon of Mars", an imaginary force that would sabotage space probes destined for the Red Planet.

The first successful Mars mission, after a serie of failure was Mariner 4 that was launched by NASA on Nevember 28,1964. It reached about 10000 km of Mars and resulted in 22 photograph as planned 

 The first space probe to orbit around Mars was Mars II in 1971. Mars III (an identical probe to Mars II) also entered orbit around Mars and dropped a landing gear successfully on its surface.It worked for only 20 seconds, experts suspect that it was destroyed by a martian dust storm.

The space missions that helped bring Mars exploration to the fore were undoubtedly the twin Vikings missions launched in 1976, they have returned the first detailed photographs of the surface of Mars. They showed a desert landscape which, in temperature, was very similar to the toundra found on Earth.

Mars exploration was then abandoned for more then 20 years, with the exception of a few unfortunate or partially successful attempts like Phobos I that has been lost on his trip to Mars in 1989 and Phobos II lost near the Phobos natural satellite of Mars, this picture constitute the last one send to Earth before it disappears :

In this picture we can see a mysterious shadow which doesn't represent Phobos II shadow, until this day, experts don't know what it should be.

The Mars Global Surveyor mission, launched in 1996 became the first successful mission to the Red Planet in 20 years.During the same year, NASA's new policy made it possible to launch the Mars Pathfinder and Sejourner rover. It traveled the surface of Mars for many weeks, analyzing rocks and fascinating the imagination of the general public.

Unfortunately, this did not prove to be the beginning of a glorious rebirth and the Mars Demon struck again, rendering all the working probes unusable or severely damaged.

A lot of other Martian missions had fail until 2001 where the US Martian Odyssey mission successfully arrived in a martian orbit and was able to conduct scientific experiments aimed at making global observation of Mars.After that we saw a renewed interest in Mars with an increase of the number of missions to Mars.

So that was kind of a sum up of the history of Mars mission, now we're gonna talk about an experiment set in 1976 on the Vikings probes I and II.

The missions of the Vikings probes were to realise pictures of the red planet, analyse its atmosphere, its composition and finally find a trace of microbial life.

They must perform 3 different experiments to find a trace of life. If 2 of them were negative, one of them called Label released (LR) was "very" positive.

They remake the experiment many time with both Viking probes which was located 4000 miles away from each other. To make sure it wasn't a simple chemical reaction, the researchers heat the sample into a temperature no microbe found on Earth would survive and the results were negative.Then, they reiterated the same experiment at a lower temperature , 50 ° C and they found a lower rate of radioactive gas. They also isolated a Martian soil sample from its environment, kept it in the dark at a temperature of 10 ° C for two months then they reiterated the experiment and the results were negative. And that constitute a clear proof of the existence of life on Mars. However, NASA refused to publish this result because of its difference with the two others experiments carried out on the same sample.

40 years later, additional information collected appears to give more credit to the results and interpretation of Gilbert Levin. Indeed, in 2008, NASA detected big amount of salt deposit on the surface of the red planet, they discovered that Mars's salt wasn't the same we have on Earth, once we heat this salt, all the organic molecule dissolve which take to the deduction that martian salt might be a fundamental ingredient of life on Mars , besides, on the two others experiments that discredit LR results, they have heat the Martian sample in older to release organic components, so that explain why the results were negative, the potential living microbes have been destructed during the heating.

Gilbert Levin who is absolutely sure of the presence of microorganism on Mars asked NASA to send another missions in order to prove  his theory, the NASA's respond is negative.