Historic Mars Lander ‘Did Find Life’

A BBC interview with Gilbert Levin of Spherix Inc., author of the preceding article, appears at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2941826.stm. It is about the discovery of Martian microbes and the research to show that they are present-day, living biological organisms. An accompanying two-minute overview video of the interview was recently posted to the web site of the Society for Planetary SETI research (SPSR) with BBC permission, through the efforts of SPSR member Ananda Sirisena. This may be viewed by going to http://spsr.utsi.edu/, clicking on the first link: "SPSR News", then click on the link to the Levin video. For the convenience of our readers, we provide the two direct links below – one to the larger 50MB MPG version of the file, the other to a 14MB small-screen version of the same file.

Levin video: 50MB or 14MB.

            There are few scientific findings of comparable importance. You are reading about it here long before the mainstream media are willing to “risk their reputations” by reporting this. Most say they are waiting for NASA’s okay. But NASA has turned control of the Martian orbiters and landers over to Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which has a financial interest in the pace of discovery being slow so their approved Mars missions through 2016 don’t get cancelled. Those missions target various lines of evidence designed to determine if ancient life ever existed on Mars billions of years ago. The two active rovers now on Mars, Spirit and Opportunity, have no water detection instruments, but were designed to look for mineralogical evidence of ancient water. In the meantime, the European Mars Express spacecraft and the Mars Rovers found evidence of present-day water-ice in craters. And the next article discusses strong evidence that the water is even in liquid form in places. So happily for the progress of science, the JPL “baby steps” strategy is not working as well as they might wish.

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