A newspaper article has been quoted widely on the Internet

Apr 30, 2010 06:57 GMT  ·  By
NASA discredits rumors that Spirit and Opportunity discovered certain signs of life on Mars
   NASA discredits rumors that Spirit and Opportunity discovered certain signs of life on Mars

Not two days ago, The Sun newspaper, from the United Kingdom, published an article boldly claiming that NASA scientists had found life on the Red Planet. The piece was heavily quoted around the Internet, on various dedicated and popular websites, but officials at American space agency say that the fuss in completely unfounded. They explain that the editor who wrote the newspaper article must have misunderstood what NASA experts were talking about at a conference aimed at marking the 50th anniversary since the search for extraterrestrials began.

One of the people who was most bothered by The Sun's piece was Steve Squyres, a planetary scientist at the Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. He is the principal science investigator for the NASA Mars Exploration Rover (MER) program. This initiative manages the Spirit and Opportunity robots, which the newspaper article wrongfully claimed were the central source for NASA's alleged discovery. The expert said yesterday in an e-mail that the title of the article was very misleading, and that the two robots have not discovered any direct signs of life on Mars.

“I can only assume that the Sun reporter misunderstood. What Spirit and Opportunity have found is sulfate minerals […] not organic materials, not pond scum, and not the building blocks of life as we know it,” said Squyres, who was one of the people mainly quoted in the troublesome article. “This headline is extremely misleading/ This makes it sound like we announced that we found life on Mars, and that is absolutely, positively false,” added NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown, from the agency's Headquarters, in Washington, DC,quoted by Space.

The MER investigator also took issue with another idea written in the article. The Sun reporter wrote that “The recent missions have gathered evidence of sulphates on Mars, a strong indication there is water on the planet and therefore life.” Squyres said that, though water was a prerequisite for the development of life as we knew it, the two did not immediately follow each other. “Evidence of water does NOT mean that there was life. We believe that water is necessary for life, but not that it is sufficient to assure life. The '...and therefore life' part of the statement therefore is simply wrong,” the expert added. “I think they have taken this stuff out of context,” Brown concluded.