Cutting Edge

Data from a comet-bound NASA probe, a robotic mission to Saturn, and a U.S. instrument aboard an Indian spacecraft have provided clear evidence that at least trace amounts of water exist on the moon's surface, researchers said Thursday.

While scientists have long suspected that water ice from comet impacts is trapped in cold, permanently shadowed craters near the moon's poles, the new data indicates that water molecules form and dissipate across broader areas, even in lunar daylight.

Data from a NASA instrument aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft show evidence of water molecules on the surface of the moon. Areas in blue show relatively high concentrations of water near the moon's poles.

(Credit: NASA)

While the data represent a major surprise and a "really profound discovery," one scientist said, researchers cautioned that the moon remains an extremely dry place, by human standards.

"The observations presented here show a combination of hydroxyl, OH (oxygen hydrogen molecules), and H2O (water) that resides in the upper few millimeters of the lunar surface," said Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division. "The average amount of water reported, if we were to extract it, is about a quart of water per ton (of surface soil)."

To put it another way, he said, about 16 ounces of water might be present for every 1,000 pounds of surface soil near the moon's poles. For soil near the equator, only about two tablespoons of water is believed to be present in every 1,000 pounds.

"Even the driest deserts on the Earth have more water than are at the poles and the surfaces of the moon," Green said.

But scientists agreed that the results open a new chapter in humanity's understanding of the moon and the processes at work across the entire solar system that could lead to water formation on other airless asteroids and moons.

"Having any water or hydroxyl in the sunlit areas of the moon is as surprising as it is intriguing," Bruce Betts, director of projects for the Planetary Society, said in a statement. "Will such results turn out to be the tip of the iceberg, or will the moon remain a dry desert with slightly more moisture than we thought?"

On a related front, NASA unveiled new findings from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Thursday that show clear evidence of huge subsurface ice sheets extending from the poles of the Red Planet halfway to its equator.

The buried ice was spotted in debris thrown up in five recent northern hemisphere impact craters. The ice is surprisingly pure and easy to see in high-resolution pictures from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Scientists believe that the ice is a remnant of a more humid period in Mars' recent history, when the planet's polar ice caps extended much farther toward the equator.

A recent impact crater on Mars, showing bright ice thrown up from a subsurface layer.

(Credit: NASA)

"Every indication is that this is forming a broad, continuous sheet beneath the surface," said Ken Edgett, a camera team member with Malin Space Science Systems of San Diego. "We have five separate impact sites, all showing more or less the same thing.

"I'd say the volume of water--and this is a guess--the volume of water is probably comparable to the volume we would have in, say, the Greenland ice sheet on the Earth, in the buried ice deposits (and the North Pole ice cap)."

Shane Byrne, a member of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment team at the University of Arizona, said the ice sheet is probably about a yard or so thick.

"These buried ice sheets that extend from the poles all the way down to 45 degrees or so (north and south latitude) don't quite cover half of the planet, but (they) come close," he said. "So we're talking about maybe a (half) million cubic kilometers of ice in total."

Water ice is a critical resource for future space travelers, as well as a requirement for the development of life as it is currently known. The presence of ice on Mars is not a surprise, although the purity and extent of the buried ice sheets is. Water on the moon, however, is another matter.

Three spacecraft--India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, NASA's Saturn-bound Cassini probe, and the agency's Deep Impact comet mission--all detected evidence of water molecules on the moon's surface. In a surprise, it appears that water molecules are present, even in the heat of direct sunlight.

"Finding water on the moon in daylight is a huge surprise, even if it is only a small amount of water and only in the form of molecules stuck to soil," Jessica Sunshine, an astronomer at the University of Maryland who helped analyze data from NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft, said in a statement. "In the Deep Impact data, we're essentially watching water molecules form and then dissipate right in front of our eyes."

What causes the water to form is not yet clear, but Sunshine said the mechanism might involve electrically charged hydrogen ions in the solar wind interacting with oxygen-rich minerals in the lunar soil to form water and hydroxyl molecules.

"We aren't certain yet how this happens," she said, "but our findings suggest a solar-driven cycle in which layers of water only a few molecules thick form, dissipate, and reform on the surface each lunar day.

"This water is formed in the morning, substantially lost by lunar midday, and reformed as the lunar surface cools towards evening."

Finding water on the moon has long been one of the holy grails of modern lunar exploration because solar power and ice deposits, assuming they are close enough to the surface, could provide a source of water, air, and rocket fuel for future moon explorers or colonists.

The discoveries announced this week don't necessarily mean that abundant water supplies are available across the moon's surface--the solar-driven cycle implied by Deep Impact would produce only trace amounts--but they show that the moon isn't the totally dry place scientists long thought it was.

Earlier data indicated possible ice deposits in permanently shadowed craters near the moon's poles, where water from comet impacts could have been trapped over the moon's long history.

In June, NASA launched two new spacecraft to the moon, the $504 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the $79 million Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or Lcross.

Orbiting the moon at an altitude of just 31 miles, the LRO spacecraft is designed to map the lunar surface in unprecedented detail to help identify possible landing sites for future manned missions. Lcross is focused specifically on water.

If all goes well, the spent second stage of the rocket that boosted LRO and Lcross to the moon will crash into a permanently shadowed crater on October 9, blasting presumably ice-bearing soil into sunlight for direct analysis by LRO, the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories. Lcross will fly through the plume, beaming back data before it, too, crashes to the surface.

Should we be going to the Red Planet next?

(Credit: NASA)

If you had to choose the subject of NASA's attention over the next decade, what would you pick? Would you want to push the space agency to go back to the moon? Would you want it to devote its budget toward a human mission to Mars?

The Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee, a panel ordered to chart the future of the U.S. space program, is trying to narrow those possibilities. So far, the group has come up with several ideas for how NASA should focus its resources (PDF).

For starters, one option the panel has suggested would see NASA focus on maintaining the International Space Station through 2020, rather than shuttering its ISS operations at the end of 2015, as planned. Another option is to get astronauts back to the moon for the first time since the Apollo program.

Another choice calls for astronauts to explore deep space, eventually traveling to Mars' moons. The panel also crafted an option that would see NASA maintain extended stays on Earth's moon. It would enable astronauts to travel to different areas of the lunar landscape, rather than stick to one location.

But perhaps the most compelling option the panel made public is an astronaut-attended trip to Mars. It said that if all of NASA's focus and government funding is allocated to going to Mars, it might be possible.

Budget costs are an obvious concern and a key determining factor in what plan NASA will follow, going forward. Panel member Norman Augustine, the former chief executive of Lockheed Martin, told The New York Times that none of the options would feature "an exorbitant price tag."

That should make legislators happy. But that alone won't determine NASA's future.

A full-scale model of Curiosity, the next-generation Mars rover, was on display at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech conference here.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

PASADENA, Calif.--While some suggest that space exploration is a luxury we can't afford in tough times, it's not surprising that Charles Elachi doesn't see it that way.

"Our economy is fundamentally dependent on innovation," said Elachi, who heads NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "This is not the time to go back and sit under our shell."

Elachi, speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech conference, said some of the technology used in space has led to things like GPS and better ways of detecting cancer.

To offer a visual aid to his argument, Elachi brought a full-scale model of the next Mars rover, due to begin its voyage in two years.

The vehicle, known as Curiosity, has 10 times the experiment carrying ability of the last Mars rover and is due to spend at least a martian year (two earth years) gathering data.

Of course, the first-generation rover was only designed to last 90 days and two of those vehicles have now been going for five years.

"Why did they survive?" Elachi said. "It is a combination of being smart and being lucky."

He noted that one of the two current rovers had one of its six wheels fail and the other has had other issues. "After a while you get old, but we've always figured out a way to manage it."

Curiosity will be nuclear powered, as opposed to the solar technology used in the first-generation vehicles.

The six members of the Mars500 team spent 105 days in this chamber at Moscow's Institute of Biomedical Problems.

(Credit: European Space Agency)

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, perhaps, we'll all be as excited about people landing on Mars as we were 40 years ago about the first moon landing. But don't hold your breath.

In the meantime, mission-to-Mars dreamers and wannabes will have to make do with Earth-bound exercises such as the European Space Agency's Mars500 program. Earlier this week, a group of six Mars500 participants emerged from a mission-to-Moscow mock-up meant to simulate part of what will eventually be a very long journey to the Red Planet.

The Euro-sextet ended their simulated Mars mission on Tuesday, after 105 days sealed into an isolation facility designed to replicate many features of a potential spacecraft built to fly to Mars and back. Since March 31, the participants (one from Germany, one from France, and four from Russia) have been engaged in science experiments, monitoring of their physiological state, and posting chirpy weekly updates.

"We had an outstanding team spirit throughout the entire 105 days," said Cyrille Fournier, the French airline pilot who posted many of the cheery log entries. "Living for that long in a confined environment can only work if the crew is really getting along with each other. The crew is the crucial key to mission success, which became very evident to me during the 105 days."

Spacecraft or dorm room? The Mars500 crew watches "Lord of the Rings."

(Credit: ESA)

Team-building exercises included watching movies and playing music. The participants also grew their own veggies, including tomatoes, strawberries, radishes, and cabbage.

The other members of the Mars500 isolation ward were Oliver Knickel, a mechanical engineer in the German army; cosmonauts Sergei Ryazansky (commander) and Oleg Artemyev; Alexei Baranov, a medical doctor; and Alexei Shpakov, a sports physiologist.

In an entry from June 23, Fournier describes a typical day.

Along with the close quarters, the Mars500 crew had to endure modest hardships, including a 20-minute delay each way in communications with "Earth" and at least one incident that, in a real spacecraft, could have proved very bad indeed. Wrote Knickel in a May 19 account that had echoes of the Apollo 13 mission:

As Murphy's Law would have it, just after midnight on 12 May, we had an off-nominal situation when the air purification and conditioning system in the crew quarters failed. This could be seen from the operation center of our module, where you can watch and tune all parameters in all three modules--including temperature, atmospheric humidity, and the concentration of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide. We quickly noticed an increase in temperature up to 30 degrees Celsius, as well as an increase of the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide concentration in the air, which can quickly become life-threatening.

The in-house repairs turned out to be fairly simple, and the crew was able to press ahead with a celebration of Knickel's 29th birthday that included balloons, gifts, and karaoke in Russian.

Since there were apparently no "Silent Running"-style meltdowns, the European Space Agency and its Russian partner, the Institute of Biomedical Problems, plan to proceed with a longer simulation, a 520-day sojourn expected to start in early 2010.

Photos: Mars500 project preps for spaceflight

Forty years after the first humans walked on the moon, NASA is trying again to reach the Earth's nearest celestial neighbor.

As envisioned, the new lunar lander will have room for four astronauts and supplies for seven days.

(Credit: NASA)

It's not just about retracing 40-year-old footsteps in the lunar dust, though. This time, NASA wants its moonshot to become an outpost and eventually a Mars shot too, if Congress and others can be persuaded to part with the necessary money.

The new attempt is well past the idea stage. Two spacecraft are freshly launched on scouting missions to map the moon and see whether permanently shaded areas in craters on its south pole really do contain ice, a substance that could make living on the moon vastly easier and that could in theory even be turned into new rocket fuel.

And, with a program called Constellation now in its third year, NASA wants to land people on the moon in 2020 and then create an outpost--a "toehold on the frontier," according to John Connolly, head of engineering for the bigger Altair lunar lander.

It might well be that overcoming the Earth's gravity is easier than overcoming the financial constraints of a nation in economic recession.

"Given the current budget, if nothing changes, it's going to be very challenging" to meet the goal of reaching the moon by 2020, said John Olson, director of NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate Integration Office.

The current budget plan is uncertain: the Obama administration in May ordered a review of human space-flight programs that considers the goal of "fitting within the current budget profile for NASA exploration activities."

Why go back?
There's no more Cold War race spurring the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to outdo the Russians, but the overall reason to go to the moon and beyond remains the same: inspiration and science.

"The most important attribute we got out of Apollo is it taught us nothing was impossible," Olson said of the first trips to the moon. Monday will mark the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's lunar landing.

The new program, with aspirations to bring people not just to the moon but also Mars and the asteroids, is "motivating the next generation of students and researchers and engineers and scientists," Olson said.

Forty years ago, NASA sent astronauts to the moon 's equator. Now the agency wants to go to its south pole, where there may be ice in shaded craters.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

NASA also takes pains to point out its economic influences--jobs, spinoffs, and money infused in the country's industrial base. The agency is seeking a 6 percent budget increase to $19.3 billion for fiscal 2010, Olson said. Elements of the Constellation program are under way in 11 states.

What's got Larry Taylor excited, though, is that "scientifically, there's a lot to learn." A former NASA geologist who worked on the Apollo missions and now a professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Taylor is interested in questions about the origins of the moon--the history of massive impacts and upwellings of the moon's initially molten interior during the early years of the solar system. Prevailing opinion today holds that the moon was a byproduct of a Mars-sized object hitting Earth in the solar system's more turbulent beginnings.

These reasons weigh against the fact that it's expensive to get to the moon.

"You're not going to see any moon mission in my opinion," predicted Charles Pellerin, who as NASA's former director of astrophysics led the Hubble Space Telescope project. "The price to go back to the moon is probably at least a doubling of NASA's budget."

He prefers robotic exploration to human exploration. And if he controlled NASA's purse strings, he'd spend the budget to study the science behind the Earth's climate, the origins of life, and new physics informed by investigation of the universe's distant past. The Hubble showed visible light from far away--and therefore long ago--but he'd like to see the same views in X-ray, gamma ray, and infrared light.

"There are phenomena throughout the universe that have physics you can't even conceive of on the Earth," Pellerin said. "Quasars release more energy in one second than the sun does in 30,000 years. How's that work?"

How do we get there?
But of course a lot of folks can get more excited about humans exploring than about astrophysics, and it's for them that NASA likes to send people into space. So how does the new and improved moon program work?

The same way the old one did, in part. "The physics of moving around the solar system hasn't changed," Connolly said. But there are many significant differences from the grander aspirations.

The Ares I and Ares V rockets both are required to get rockets into orbit. The Ares I can get 22 metric tons into low Earth orbit, compared to 25 metric tons for the Space Shuttle, in part to service the space station. The Ares V can get 53 metric tons to the moon by itself and 65 when paired with an Ares I.

(Credit: NASA)

"We designed the transportation system so we could fly folks to Mars eventually," Connolly said. Chiefly, that means that the system can lift more mass into space, whether to build a lunar outpost or to head to Mars.

To lift more weight, there are two rockets, Ares I and V, instead of Apollo's one rocket. The smaller Ares I is designed to carry the crew--as many as six, four of whom can land on the moon. The more powerful Ares V is for carrying the Altair lunar lander and anything else destined for the surface of the moon, such as a pressurized vehicle or a lunar dwelling.

The two rockets' contents will be united in orbit around the Earth, then the cargo in the tip of the Ares V, called the Earth departure stage, will carry the crew and lander to the moon, according to the plan. As with Apollo, the lander will make the descent to the moon while some crew remain above in an orbiter.

The lander itself looks as awkward as the original Apollo landers, including the four splayed legs. But it's bigger, with enough resources to keep four people on the lunar surface for a full seven days, compared to two for Apollo.

On the way back, the bottom half of the lander stays put on the moon while the ascent stage docks with the orbiter in orbit about 100 kilometers above the lunar surface. The crew is reunited, the ascent stage is discarded, and the crew return to Earth, eventually plunging through the atmosphere in a conical capsule

For Mars, things get more complicated, though details are not pinned down yet. The lunar missions are designed to let engineers work out the issues. Even under the optimistic schedule, a Mars return is set tentatively for 2030.

Meanwhile, in 2009
NASA's present work is designed to lay the groundwork for a manned moon mission with two spacecraft that were launched June 18.

First is the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has begun mapping the lunar surface from the very low elevation of 50 kilometers, or about 31 miles. NASA plans to release its first images of proposed landing sites on Friday.

But the rocket could carry a little more payload, so piggybacking on the trip is the second craft, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (Lcross). This craft will come to a deliberate and dramatic end October 9, when first the Centaur rocket that carried it and the LRO to the moon smashes into a crater at a speed of 1.55 miles per second, then Lcross itself follows shortly after.

The LRO and Lcross spacecraft are the colorful objects at the tip of this rocket. LRO has begun mapping the moon in detail, and Lcross will watch as the 5,000kg trailing Centaur rocket system smashes into the moon. After studying the resulting debris, Lcross itself will collide.

(Credit: NASA)

Lcross sports three cameras, said Rusty Hunt, one of the mission's flight directors, to closely watch the debris from when the 5,200-pound, 41-foot Centaur rocket hits the moon. NASA expects a plume 6.2 miles high, and Lcross will send a real-time stream of observational data to Earth.

Various Earth-bound telescopes and the Hubble will watch the plume, too. And because the plume will be visible from Earth with modestly powerful telescopes, NASA hopes amateur astronomers will send in their own photographs to help analyze the position and visibility of the plume.

Photos: The Apollo 11 moon landing

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So why the south pole?

The Apollo missions landed on the moon's equatorial regions, a navigationally simpler task. But there are good reasons to visit the polar reasons when it comes to human habitation resulting from the fact that some rises are in permanent sunlight and some crater interiors are in permanent shade.

Scientists have found the physical signature of hydrogen in the polar regions, leading them to believe it's possible there is ice hidden in the shade. The ice, likely the leftovers of eons of comet impacts, is useful for human consumption and, more grandly, for producing rocket fuel by splitting it into the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen that are today's rocket propellant of choice. And, of course, oxygen is necessary for breathing.

"If we can find water, it greatly enhances our ability to set up a long-term outpost or permanent moon base," Hunt said. Scientifically, "it'll help to fill in gaps about the early evolution of the moon and the earth-moon system and solar system if we can say yes, indeed, there's water there."

Lunar high ground on the polar regions benefit from permanent sunlight, too. That makes for an easier, balmier climate and means rotating solar panels can track the sun at all times with ease, Connolly said.

August panel results
The present moon missions stem from an initiative former President George W. Bush outlined in 2004. Five years later, LRO and Lcross show some evidence that NASA is making progress.

The budgetary hurdles are formidable. The first clues about funding are scheduled for August, when the head of the Obama administration's human space-flight review, retired Lockheed Martin chief executive Norm Augustine, presents his panel's options.

In the long run, though, Olson is optimistic not only about revisiting the moon, but making it to Mars, too.

"I don't think we're yet ready from fiscal or technical capability to go to Mars," Olson said. "But I'm confident we'll eventually get there."

Mars500 participant Cyrille Fournier gets wired up for EEG monitoring of his sleep patterns.

(Credit: ESA)

Prolonged enclosure in any indoor space, especially a small one, generally produces a condition known as cabin fever--you get cranky and restless and even a bit claustrophobic. Playing board games and tending to the houseplants gets old fast.

So what exactly are they pumping into the air in the several oversized tin cans of the Mars500 project to make the astronaut role players grin so much and so broadly? The six men are locked into a 200-square-meter space to simulate the conditions of a trip to Mars and back, and they're already three weeks into a 105-day stay. (Later this year, a 520-day sojourn will begin.)

Photos: Mars500 project preps for spaceflight

Apparently, they really, really love their work. Or at least that's what the European Space Agency really, really wants us to believe, since all we know of the Mars500 crew's activities are what we see in the press release photos and officially posted diary entries. I mean, I've seen my share of publicity photos, but come on.

No, no, I know. I don't really expect anyone to turn into Jack Nicholson in "The Shining." But do the diary notes have to be so chirpy, and the photos so deliriously happy?

Anyway, in the latest installment from Moscow's Institute of Biomedical Problems, where the Mars500 research facility is located, we find out that the crew members have been honing their poker skills, making improvised drums out of plastic containers, and celebrating Orthodox Easter with some chocolate eggs. They also got in their weekly 15 minutes per person in the 1-square-meter sauna.

Oh, yes, and they're working on their scientific experiments, too. A central goal of the Mars500 project is to get a reading on things like sleep patterns and mood swings, which certainly will be legitimate concerns for long space voyages.

Earlier this week, participant Oliver Knickel reported on the results of the first "electronic nose" experiment, in which a device sucks in air, and internal filters capture traces of bacteria and fungi. "Fortunately," he writes, "we have not found any dangerous pathogens so far."

The study of sleep patterns, meanwhile, has had a hiccup. In doing their first recording of brainwaves during sleep, the group had "quite a surprise" to find that the EEG machine had come unplugged sometime during the night--two nights running. "Since then we are looking for the ghost of Cyrille's quarters who wants to accompany us on our simulated journey to Mars," Knickel writes.

A ghost, eh? With any luck, the crew has packed a few Stephen King novels after all and the Mars500 narrative will get just that much more interesting.

The blue device in the hands of Mars500 crewmember Oliver Knickel is an electronic nose, in search of bacteria and fungi.

(Credit: ESA)

NASA will delay the launch of the next-generation Mars rover two years due to technical difficulties and cost overruns.

The mission, which was originally scheduled for late next year, is now slated for 2011, officials said Thursday, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. The new target date was the earliest available because missions to Mars can be launched only every 26 months, when the Earth and Mars are properly aligned.

The SUV-size rover, known as the Mars Science Laboratory, is designed to explore the planet's surface for the possibility of habitability, both current and past. But problems developed in the design and operation of the 31 actuators that control the mechanics of the craft, including the steering mechanism and its robotic arm, according to the report.

Meanwhile, NASA plans to try to contact the Mars Phoenix lander in the Martian spring, according to a Reuters report. The Phoenix, which landed on Mars in May, last communicated with the Mars Odyssey orbiter on November 2, when the lander lost power and shut down.

NASA had expected the Phoenix to lose power during the harsh Martian winter, when temperatures dip to negative 150 degrees Fahrenheit. But NASA said there is a chance that the lander survived the winter and will try to re-establish contact in the Martian spring.

An artist's concept of how glaciers on Mars might look.

(Credit: NASA/JPL)

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has detected what NASA scientists believe are huge glaciers of water ice lying beneath a layer of rocky debris.

The finding is significant because it helps scientists better understand a feature of the Martian surface that has puzzled them for decades. In the 1970s, the Viking orbiters sent back images that showed what have been dubbed "aprons," or large, gently sloping deposits of debris situated at the base of tall geographic formations like cliffs. Several theories for what created these aprons have been posed over the years. This research indicates that what's just beneath that debris is of much greater interest.

To investigate the planet's surface, the MRO spacecraft uses a radar instrument, donated for the project by the Italian Space Agency, that can penetrate the Martian ground. The instrument detected radio waves bouncing off a layer of material beneath the surface that were consistent with what is found in areas covered with water ice glaciers.

One of the things that makes the glaciers so interesting is their location. They're in the middle latitudes, far from the planet's polar caps where other signs of water ice have been discovered. The glaciers observed in this study are in the southern hemisphere, but similar features have been spotted in the same latitude bands in the northern hemisphere. That led researchers to believe that, however the glaciers got there, they're the result of a climate-based phenomenon.

And they're big, too. The glaciers reach for dozens of miles. One is three times larger than the city of Los Angeles and is up to a half-mile thick.

"Altogether, these glaciers almost certainly represent the largest reservoir of water ice on Mars that is not in the polar caps," lead author John W. Holt, of the University of Texas at Austin, said in a report.

The findings will be reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

NASA's Phoenix Lander team said this week it has found a toxic chemical in the soil of Mars' northern hemisphere, where it has previously confirmed the existence of water.

The University of Arizona-based team believes the chemical is perchlorate, an oxidant typically used in solid rocket fuel. The scientists are still analyzing the soil sample to make sure it wasn't brought to Mars from Earth, according to a statement. But if the oxidant is native, it would bar the possibility of life there.

"While we have not completed our process on these soil samples, we have very interesting intermediate results," Peter Smith, Phoenix's principal investigator at the University of Arizona, said in a statement. "Initial...analysis suggested Earth-like soil. Further analysis has revealed un-Earthlike aspects of the soil chemistry."

According to a report from CNN, the Viking 1 and 2 lander missions in the 1970s found oxidants in the soil that led many scientists to believe there could be no life on Mars.