Curiosity could prove scientists actually found life on Mars 30 years ago

London, August 10 (ANI): One scientist hopes the Curiosity rover can add weight to his claim to have discovered organic material on Mars nearly 30 years ago.

Gilbert Levin - who led the 'labelled release' experiment on NASA's 1976 Viking mission to the Red Planet - is confident that Curiosity will find evidence proving his claim to have found carbon-based molecules there, the Daily Mail reported.

If it does, he is ready to demand that his refuted discovery of life on Mars is reinstated.

Dr Levin, a former sanitary engineer, in 1976 led an experiment, which mixed Martian soil with a nutrient containing radioactive carbon.

His hypothesis was that if bacteria were present in the soil, they would metabolise the nutrient and release some of the digested molecules as carbon dioxide.

In fact, the experiment found that carbon dioxide was released and that it contained radioactive carbon atoms.

However, a sister experiment refuted their findings.

The Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer on the Viking module was also looking for carbon-based molecules, but found none and NASA chiefs ruled that life could not exist without these modules.

However, since then, some of the team who carried out the GCMS experiment have admitted their apparatus was not sensitive enough to detect organic molecules - even in Earth soils known to contain microbes.

Now, if Curiosity does find organic molecules, Dr Levin wants a reanalysis of his original data.

"I'm very confident that MSL ( Mars Science Laboratory) will find the organics and possibly that the cameras will even see something," he told New Scientist.

Dr Hazen says that the claim holds some water, since it had been widely accepted that Dr Levin's findings could only have been seen if microbial metabolisms were present in the Martian soil.

"If you can't explain that through an obvious inorganic process, then it follows that microbial life is a real possibility," he added. (ANI)