Is NASA covering up evidence of life on Mars? That’s what University of Cardiff astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe claims as quoted in an article on the Helium website (warning: site has autoloading video ads).

First, I want to note that this article doesn’t appear to have much new about it; Wickramasinghe made these claims as far back as 2008, and there’s no link in the article to where he may have talked about it more recently. Still, given the nature of these claims (and the knowledge that this will probably spread around the ‘net rapidly), it’s worth talking about.

I’ll be up front about this: I have serious problems with lots of claims made by Wickramasinghe. He thinks that life on Earth began in space and was seeded here, a process called panspermia. That’s an interesting idea, and has been around a long time. The problem is, he sees it everywhere. In 2003 he claimed that SARS was extraterrestrial. He says a "red rain" in India in 2001 was due to alien bacteria (it is far more likely it was due to very Earthly spores). He claims that flu outbreaks — yes, influenza — come from space. So he’s had a long history of making grand claims on ambiguous evidence^*.

I think this is where we are with Wickramasinghe’s claims that NASA is covering up life on Mars. Still, he is an actual University scientist, so if he makes claims, they’re worth looking into. But in my opinion they don’t hold up to scrutiny:

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In the late 1970s, NASA landed two probes on the Martian surface. The Viking missions were designed to scoop up surface material and examine it for indications of life.

What was expected was for the missions to detect organic compounds: carbon-based molecules like amino acids that make up the building blocks of life. Instead, the results they got were disappointing. Instead of organics, they found compounds of chlorine like chloromethane and dichloromethane, which were interpreted as contamination from labs back on Earth (from cleaning fluids!).

However, in 2008, the Mars Phoenix lander did its own scooping, and found something unexpected: perchlorate. This molecule is made up of one chlorine atom and four oxygen atoms (ClO₄) and has the interesting property of being very reactive with organic molecules. It’s found naturally on Earth, too.

What’s so very interesting about this is that recently, scientists took samples of soil in Chile, added perchlorate, and then analyzed those samples in the same way Viking did. Guess what they got?
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