Word: jastrow
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...unsure. In a Washington press conference summarizing the Viking findings, they announced that the results made it impossible to say that there was or was not life on Mars. That has remained NASA's official position. But unofficially, a handful of scientists support the view of Physicist Robert Jastrow, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Says he in a forthcoming article in Natural History magazine: "Although the Viking experiments have contradictory elements, they seem to indicate that life, or some process closely imitating life, exists on Mars today...
Complex Reaction. Jastrow and those who hold similar views base their judgment not on new evidence but on an analysis of the biology experiments conducted by the Viking landers. The gas exchange test, based on the fact that terrestrial organisms give off gases as waste products, involved dropping a pinch of Martian soil into a warm, moist test chamber. The aim was to determine whether the sample would give off carbon dioxide, as animals would, or oxygen, as plants do. Scientists were surprised when the sample began releasing oxygen far more rapidly than plants would be expected...
...third experiment was designed to measure the conversion of atmospheric carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide into organic matter. The results suggested that this process, which is carried out on earth in living cells, might also be taking place on Mars. In Jastrow's view, the experiment undermined the argument that peroxides might have been responsible for the results of the other tests. If peroxides were involved in this activity, certain catalysts had to be present and the reaction more complex...
...Robert Jastrow...
...infancy. The earth was formed some 4.5 billion years ago, but the slow, relentless process of its evolution wiped out all traces of its earliest years; the oldest known terrestrial rocks date back about 3.3 billion years. "What has happened during the missing 1.2 billion years?" wonders Astronomer Robert Jastrow, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "We do not know; they are a blank page in the history of our planet. If the age of the rocks on the surface of the moon turns out to be 4.5 billion years, we may learn...