Water and the Search for Life on Mars [Paperback]

Relates how NASA/ESA have sought evidence of life on Mars, with the prevailing mood sometimes being optimistic and sometimes pessimistic.

Details an account of the rationale for the tests for life carried out by the Viking missions in 1976, with an account of the debate over their results.

A concise primer for readers wishing to bone up when NASA next sends a lander explicitly to seek life on Mars.

Discusses the nature of life on Mars in terms of the most primitive forms of life on Earth, and reviews the implications of there being life on both planets.

Mars has long been believed to have been cold, dead and dry for aeons, but there is now striking new proof that not only was Mars a relatively warm and wet place in geologically recent times, but that even today there are vast reserves of water frozen beneath the planets surface. As well as casting fascinating new insights into Mars past, this discovery is also forcing a complete rethink about the mechanisms of global planetary change and the possibility that there is microbial life on Mars.

David Harland considers the issue of life on Mars in parallel with the origin of life on Earth. At the time the Viking instruments were designed, it was thought that all terrestrial life ultimately derived its energy from sunlight, and that the earliest form of life was the cyanobacteria with chlorophyll for photosynthesis. It was assumed the same would be the case on Mars and that microbial life would be on or near the surface that the Vikings had sampled.

No sooner were the results from the Viking instruments in, than it was discovered that there was an even older type of microbial life on Earth when, in 1977 black smokers were found in volcanically active parts of the ocean floor, at depths of severlCV