From the Viking Missions and beyond, the hard work of looking for life

CORTÓN, EDUARDO

Lima

Congreso; I Congreso Latinoamericano de Astrobiología (I-CLA); 2016

Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Peru

The Viking Missions were the first opportunity to search for microbiological life outside Earth, specifically designed to be performed automatically. Viking 1 and 2 pursued similar objectives, with the Landers sampling different zones of the Mars soil. The Missions reach a higher complexity and cost than other unmanned mission never before, and probably never later,given the end, few years after the missions, of the cold war, and the so called -space race- between USA and the Soviet Union. Before the Viking Missions, the mos trelevant minds at that time gathered together in a series of conferences, where most of the theoretical and experimental results about the origins of life were discussed (first to fourth Conferences on Origin of Life, from 1967 to 1973).  The Proceedings of these conferences were edited by Lynn Margulis, and other relevant scientists were Stanley Miller,Leslie Orgel, Juan Oró, and Carl Sagan, among others. In these conferences, the knowledge about life at Earth and how to look for life of life signs at other planets was discussed, in preparation for the Viking Missions.The conferences help to design and decide about the Vikings life experiments to be carried, given the limited payload and power available. At that time, the life was assumed carbon-based and liquid water dependent, that assumption was determinant in all the biological experiments. Here we will review the assumptions and experimental set-ups of the Viking biological experiments, their results, and briefly present our approachfor more wide life searching criteria, where the presence of redox reactions can be used as a carbon or not carbon-based life.