Nasa insists perchlorate doesn't rule out life on Mars

The discovery of highly reactive salts on Mars led to rumours that their presence precluded life there. But even if the salts originated on the Red Planet they do not rule out life, reports
Marcus Pearce

Not so, according to Michael Hecht of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who said that "finding perchlorates is neither good nor bad for life". However, he said different perchlorate salts have different properties that could "make us reassess how we think about life on Mars" if the finding were confirmed and perchlorate was found at other sites.

One possibility, for example, is that the soil samples were contaminated by perchlorates transported from Earth on the lander. Although the fuel of Phoenix itself contains no perchlorates, they were used in the boosters during launch.

The Phoenix project took the unusual step of releasing these intermediate results: "We decided to show the public science in action because of the extreme interest in the Phoenix mission, which is searching for a habitable environment on the northern plains of Mars," said principal investigator Peter Smith.