A German astrobiologist suggests that humans might have inadvertently wiped out Martian life nearly 50 years ago, during NASA’s Viking 1 mission, which saw two spacecraft land on Mars and conduct grou

In all our explorations of Mars to date, no evidence has been found that meets the rigorous standards to claim that we have conclusively found life. But, decades ago in the 1970s, when the Viking landers became the first US mission to safely land on and explore the red planet,

Dirk Schulze-Makuch believes NASA's Viking 1 may have harmed potential Martian life through its water-based detection methods.

An astrobiologist suggests that NASA's Viking missions in the 1970s may have inadvertently eliminated potential Martian life. The experiments, designed to detect life by introducing water, might have overwhelmed microbes adapted to Mars' hyperarid conditions.