[LINK] "Proof of Martians 'to come this year'"

[rfmcdonald]

This Scientific American report makes me happy. The 1911 Nakhla meterorite fall, it turns out, might provide critical evidence.

David McKay, chief of astrobiology at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, says powerful new microscopes and other instruments will establish whether features in martian meteorites are alien fossils.

He says evidence for life in the space rocks could have been claimed by the UK if British scientists had used readily-available electron microscopes. Instead, images of colonies of martian bacteria were collected by American scientists.

The NASA team is already convinced that colonies of micro-organisms are visible inside three martian rocks that landed on Earth. If so, this would have profound implications for our understanding of life in the universe.

[. . .]

The NASA team believes a planet-wide network of micro-organisms came to life underground on Mars 3.6 billion years ago when the planet was much warmer and wetter with a much thicker atmosphere. Simple life was developing on Earth around the same time.

McKay says it is remarkable that some of the most striking new evidence for life on Mars has been sitting in London for nearly 100 years.

He told the website Spaceflight Now that if British researchers had examined their Nakhla meteorite with readily available electron microscopes and other tools like those used by the U.S. team, the new evidence for life on Mars could have been a British discovery, rather than an American one.

He added: "We do not yet believe that we have rigorously proven there is - or was - life on Mars. But we do believe that we are very, very close to proving there is or has been life there."