Word: martian
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...Harold Klein, biology team leader of the Viking mission, published about the time that the first U.S. lander went to work on the surface of Mars. Yet last November, after these same life-seeking experiments aboard both the Viking landers had shown apparently positive results in tests of Martian soil, Klein and other NASA scientists seemed 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...
...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 to do. But they noted...
...yeah--don't forget ol' Neil Young, the Beach Goys, the farm animals, the Martian Martians, the thought police, and all the people you stopped writing letters to once life became so serious...
...area of the old Confederacy embraces 55 million people. It sprawls from the porticoed mansions along the James River to the bare Martian surfaces of the Permian basin. It includes the clear alpine valleys of the Blue Ridge and the subtropical swamps of south Georgia. It boasts the 18th century architecture of Charleston, S.C., and the climbing glass silos by John Portman in Atlanta. Its exports include cotton and tobacco to the North, politicians to Washington, novelists to the world and rockets to outer space...
Exotic Chemistry. But the devices that got the most attention were those in Viking 2's biology laboratory, the small (1 cu. ft.) package designed to detect life on Mars. This week the lander is to stretch out its robot arm, scoop up a sample of Martian soil and dump it into the minilab, which will repeat the three life-seeking experiments already performed by Viking 1. If the scoop works and all goes according to schedule, the results of these experiments could be in early next week...