Word: soiling
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...electrifying announcement. At a hastily called press conference at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, last weekend, Viking Scientist Harold Klein reported that the newly begun biology experiments aboard the Mars lander had already shown a strange process-perhaps life-going on in the Martian soil. Said Klein: "We have at least preliminary evidence of a very active surface material. It looks at first indication very much like biological activity...
...evidence that excited Viking scientists came from two of the three biological tests that had begun only three days earlier. One of the Viking experiments, designed to detect respiration, showed that 15 times as much oxygen as the scientists expected had come from the Martian soil sample. The other, which uses radioactive tracers to look for signs of metabolic activity, showed what Klein called "a very strong, positive response." Said a Viking spokesman: "If there is life on Mars, this is what it should be doing...
Viking scientists cautioned that more tests are necessary; the oxygen might simply have been released from some mineral in the soil sample when it was placed in the heated experiment chamber, and the radioactive gases produced in the other test might have been caused by an oxidation process not connected with life. Still, said Klein, "if it is a biological response, then it is a stronger response than we have seen in fairly rich terrestrial soil, and it would also imply that microbal life on Mars is highly developed-more intense than it is on earth...
...point early in the eventful week, it had been so quiet at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that scientists could hear a pin drop. Then, 214 million miles away, a pin did drop-onto the reddish soil of Mars. It fell from Viking, freeing the mechanical arm that it had jammed and enabling the lander to begin its historic life-seeking experiments. Some 19 minutes later, as telemetry confirming that the arm was no longer jammed appeared on the console screens at JPL, scientists and engineers broke into cheers. Said Meteorologist Seymour Hess: "Happiness is a functioning instrument in a spacecraft...
Three days later, shortly after Martian sunrise, Viking reached out with its arm, scooped up a sample of Martian soil and dumped it into the craft's biological laboratory. Scientists first learned that the arm was working from a picture transmitted from the lander. The shot showed a footprint-like trench about 6½ in. long, 2½ in. wide and 2 in. deep that had been scooped out by Viking. Scientists were struck by the fact that the sides of the trench had not collapsed. Said Princeton University Geologist Robert Hargraves: "It's strange material. It looks...