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It now appears almost certain that the Viking Lander’s life experiment succeeded, and that there is life on Mars. However, NASA interpreted the results too conservatively, and the chance to direct exploration of Mars toward the discovery of life was lost. Now, however, a new look at the results may change all that.

In the Daily Mail, Rob Waugh writes: "In July 1976, the Viking 1 probe touched down on Mars and failed to find traces of life–but now, three decades later, scientists think the experiment was flawed. Viking 1 did find evidence of extraterrestrial microbes in soil samples from the Red Planet."
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Just as NASA was about to solve the mystery of whether or not there is life on Mars, the world went broke and both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) had to back off on their plans to send astronauts and rovers there to find out. Two NASA missions to Mars–one in 2016 and another in 2018–have been canceled.

In the March 13 edition of the New York Times, Kenneth Chang quotes Planetary Society director Bill Nye as saying, "The pipeline is being shut off, and that’s not what anyone wants. We are closer than anyone has ever been to discovering life on another world."
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One reason we may not have discovered the definitive answer to the question of whether there is life on Mars is because we have not used the right TOOLS to detect it. But now NASA is getting ready to send a life-detection tool to Mars that is 1,000 times more sensitive than previous instruments. Astronomer Jeffrey Bada says, "The bottom line is that if life is out there, the high-tech tools of chemistry will find it sooner or later. It certainly is starting to look like there may be something alive out there somewhere, with Mars being the most accessible place to search."
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