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8Jan/110

Life’s Building Blocks May Have Been Found on Mars

NASA's Viking landers may have detected the ingredients for life on Mars after all, according to a new study.

Back in the 1970s, the two Viking probes scooped up and heated Martian dirt, then looked for organic molecules — the carbon-based building blocks of life as we know it — in the samples. The landers found little, aside from two strange chlorine compounds that researchers at the time attributed to contamination from cleaning fluids.

But the new study suggests that the soil did indeed contain organics, which can have biological or nonbiological origins. They were just destroyed before Viking could detect them.

"This result is saying that there are organic molecules on Mars," study co-author Chris McKay, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., told SPACE.com. "It doesn't say anything about life now, or life in the past. But it does open up the possibility of searching for organic molecules produced by life, and that's very exciting."

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/01/07/lifes-building-blocks-mars/#ixzz1AWK2NrIv

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