Word: life
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...spending their postflight quarantine, teams of scientists are trying to put together bits and pieces of the lunar puzzle. Much of the work proceeds at a slow, painstaking pace. Last week, some NASA geologists seemed almost apologetic about their progress. "I've never been so frustrated in my life," complained Mineralogist Elbert King, the LRL's curator. "We've been working for years to get the lunar samples in our clutches. But I was unable to find a single mineral that I could immediately identify...
...secrets. By analyzing a pinch of the powdery lunar dust with a flame ionization detector, Chemist Richard Johnson of NASA's Ames Research Center found the first conclusive evidence of organic compounds on the moon. The presence of these carbon-containing compounds does not prove the existence of life on the moon-simply that its soil contains an element that is basic to life on earth. Johnson found only 25 parts per million of such compounds in his lunar sample, compared with perhaps 10,000 p.p.m. in a typical backyard sample of the earth's soil. The scientists...
...dioxide)? Do those long controversial "canals" really exist, or are they optical illusions? The 1965 flight of Mariner 4 showed that Mars is pocked by moonlike craters, apparently as a result of meteor bombardment. But the unmanned probe did not determine whether Mars can support anything remotely like earthly life...
Mariner 6's final photographs did not show any signs of life-but JPL scientists had already warned that even at the spacecraft's relatively close distances, vegetation would be all but unobservable. The two Mariners, moreover, were designed only to determine whether Mars could support life. At week's end, investigators were already mulling over two important observations. Mariner 6 had failed to detect any nitrogen -an ingredient of all earthly life -but it found signs of water in the form of ice in the Martian atmosphere or on the surface...
Modern science has long since dispelled most of the ancient myths. Yet it has failed to solve one of the great Martian mysteries: Does the planet harbor any form of life...