Word: martian
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...Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
...their accomplishment. "How many times does Columbus arrive in history?" asked Gerald Soffen, Viking project scientist. "We've just witnessed one of the arrivals. We are a privileged generation." For the first time, through an obedient and ingeniously contrived robot, man was about to gaze at a Martian landscape, to begin sifting through Martian soil for evidence that life exists beyond the earth...
Painted Desert. Like an apprehensive human who had plummeted from the sky onto alien soil, Viking first looked down at its footing, transmitting back to Pasadena the historic, if not dramatic first picture from the Martian surface. It showed one of the lander's round footpads resting upon an area of hard-packed soil strewn with pebbles and small rocks of varying sizes. At J.P.L., 212 million miles away, scientists could clearly see the rows of rivets on the lander's foot, late (Martian) afternoon shadows and-extending from rocks-dirt tails that might have been formed...
...making his decisions, Martin is confronted by a complex series of deadlines. Some biologists are worried that the "chicken soup"-a nutrient-rich broth that will be used to moisten samples of Martian soil to determine if they contain organisms-will not keep long enough for all of the experiments scheduled. Even more vexing, Viking 2 is scheduled to arrive at Mars and go into orbit on Aug. 7. That will crowd the schedule of the Viking 1 lander, which will not begin to conduct its experiments until eight days after it lands. Each of the experiments requires an eleven...
...Viking 1's tests -and those done later by Viking 2 -prove negative, the question of life on Mars will remain unresolved; the landers may simply be in the wrong places, or organisms may be thriving just a few inches below the deepest excavation of the sampler. Or Martian bugs may simply have chemistry so different from that of terrestrial life that Viking may be unable to recognize the alien processes...