No Organic Compounds on Mars? Understanding the Structure of Spiral Galaxies

A prime goal of the Viking missions to Mars is to search for life on that planet. Each of the two landers incorporate three specific life-detection experiments, and all have operated successfully. However, as any newspaper reader knows, the results are ambiguous, in that some experiments suggest a highly active martian biology while others appear to indicate that the samples are sterile. It would be premature to conclude from the results of the biological experiments that martian life forms have definitely been detected. In addition, the picture is clouded by unexpected results from another Viking experiment, which is designed to detect organic and inorganic chemical compounds in the martian soil. In Science for 1 October 1976, K. Biemann of MIT and ten of his colleagues report the first results from the Viking 1 Gas-Chromatograph/Mass Spectrometer (GCMS) experiment.