Mars Life? 20 Years Later, Debate Over Meteorite Continues

Twenty years ago, NASA scientists and their colleagues announced they had spotted possible signs of Mars life in a meteorite. The claim ignited a scientific controversy that lingers to this day.

By Charles Q. Choi Space.com 8-10-16

In 1996, researchers led by David McKay, Everett Gibson and Kathie Thomas-Keprta from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston suggested that they might have found microbial fossils in a meteorite from Mars known as Allan Hills 84001 (ALH 84001). (Cosmic impacts on Mars can be powerful enough to blast rocks off the Red Planet, a fraction of which crash on Earth, the moon and other bodies in the solar system.)

The meteorite was first discovered in 1984 by geologists riding snowmobiles through the Allan Hills region of Antarctica. Scientists think ALH 84001 originally formed 4 billion years ago on Mars and landed on Earth about 13,000 years ago.

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Evidence of ET Life in (Another) Mars Meteorite?

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By Ian O'Neill
news.discovery.com
2-28-14

      A meteorite from Mars has been studied up-close and scientists have detected tiny structures that could be interpreted as having a biological origin.

This moment of déjà vu is brought to you by a new paper published in the February issue of Astrobiology where a team of scientists from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., describe the results of work on a 14 kilogram (30 pound) meteorite called Yamato 000593 (Y000593). The meteorite sample contains strong evidence that Mars used to be a lot wetter than it is now, but the researchers also report on the discovery of evidence for “biological processes” that occurred on the Red Planet hundreds of millions of years ago.

Although this sounds exciting, there will likely be some skepticism, but the researchers appear to have foreseen the media circus that “Mars life” always inspires and refused to appear overly excited of some pretty fascinating evidence for ancient microbial life. . . .

. . . In 1996, President Clinton made a high profile announcement on national television that evidence for life had been discovered by NASA scientists inside another Martian meteorite called Allan Hills 84001 (ALH84001). The discovery focused around scanning electron microscope images of the microscopic detail of ALH84001. The team, led by David McKay of Johnson Space Center, identified “biogenic structures” inside the meteorite that was theorized to be formed by indigenous life on Mars. . . .

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