Forty years ago, a possibility of the existence of life in Mars was detected by Gil Levin while he was watching a piece of paper going out in a paper and was waiting in his lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The 1976 Viking mission was considered by NASA a technical success, however, the evidence collected was not enough to prove the existence of a microbiotic Martian. Thus, few scientists believed in him.
"I was sort of set aback," Penny Boston told Washington Post. "I was thinking, "Gosh, I want to work in exobiology, as we called it all the time, and now it seems like it's just a pile of rocks, and there's no life there at all." Boston at that time was still in college.
The 1976 Viking mission landing's 40th anniversary was honored by Langley Research Center where they held a two-day conference as it seems like the most optimistic landing ever. Boston added, "Every new piece of information we get about the planet seems to point to greater and greater habitability. It just seems more and more likely."
Indeed, for the past years, they are sending non-stop exploration to the Red Planet to find the smallest possibility of the existing of life. The two Vikings landed showed "things like teardrop-shaped islands, abandoned oxbow sections of channels, features looking at rivers on earth we could understand that these features on Mars have been carved by water, and in some cases by great flood of water, coursing across the Martian surface," said NASA's scientist, Ellen Stofan.
In the quest to finding life in Mars, there are many questions that surrounded the NASA team and that includes finances as to how will they fund such costly research and missions? Also, what is the effect of this mission to the astronauts? Can they obtain uncontaminated evidence from the Red Planet?
Despite, NASA never loses hope. "It is estimated that by the 2030s humans on Mars will be a reality," reported by Stock News USA.
