The witness bird calls series#

In one of them, nutrients containing radioactive carbon-14 were added to the soil samples. The experiments chemically treated small samples of Martian soil in reaction chambers on board the landers.

The witness bird calls series#

In the 1970s Nasa’s Viking robotic landers carried a series of experiments designed to test the Martian soil for the presence of microorganisms. In other words, simply because something might look a bit like life (mushrooms or otherwise), that does not mean it is. Debate over the true origins of these structures continues today – many scientists have pointed out that well known inorganic processes are quite capable of producing structures which resemble living organisms. The tiny structures discovered within, using powerful microscopes, resemble microscopic worm-like organisms and are likely to be billions of years old. High-resolution scanning electron microscope image of the structures.

On August 7, 1996, the then US president Bill Clinton stood on the White House lawn and announced the possibility that scientists had discovered the ancient, fossilised remains of micro-organisms in a meteorite that had been recovered from Antarctica in 1984. These space “mushrooms” were not the first claim of alien life. The area around Opportunity’s landing site is littered with them – they can be seen all over the surface and were also found buried beneath the soil and even embedded within rocks. They could also have been produced by volcanic activity.Įither way, mushrooms they are not. The spherical rocks on Mars may have been created by the gradual accumulation of the material in slowly evaporating liquid water environments. Haematite is a compound of iron and oxygen and is commercially important on Earth. They are not, in fact, living organisms at all, but “haematite concretions” – small sphere-shaped pieces of the mineral haematite, and their exact origin is still debated by scientists. As it happens, these particular features are well known and were discovered by cameras aboard Nasa’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, shortly after it landed in 2004. A recent study claims to have found evidence for mushroom-like life forms on the surface of Mars.