New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week. Further, NASA doesn't need a human expedition to Mars to nail down the claim, neuropharmacologist and biologist Joseph Miller, with the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, told Discovery News. "The ultimate proof is to take a video of a Martian bacteria. They should send a microscope -- watch the bacteria move," Miller said. "On the basis of what we've done so far, I'd say I'm 99 percent sure there's life there," he added.

More than 30 years after NASA's Viking landers found no evidence for organic materials on Mars, scientists say a new experiment on Mars-like soil shows Viking did, in fact, hit pay dirt. The new study was prompted by the August 2008 discovery of powerful oxygen-busting compounds known as perchlorates at the landing site of another Mars probe called Phoenix. Scientists repeated a key Viking experiment using perchlorate-enhanced soil from Chile's Atacama Desert, which is considered one of the driest and most Mars-like places on Earth, and found telltale fingerprints of combusted organics -- the same chemicals Viking scientists dismissed as contaminants from Earth. "Contrary to 30 years of perceived wisdom, Viking did detect organic materials on Mars," planetary scientist Christopher McKay, with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News. "It's like a 30-year-old cold case suddenly solved with new facts."

Samples of Mars dirt collected by NASA's Viking Mars landers back in the 1970s may have contained carbon-based chemical building blocks of life as we know it, a new study suggests. During their missions, the two Viking landers vaporized Martian dirt and scrutinized the samples for signs of organic - or carbon-based - molecules that could serve as the raw ingredients for life. At the time, all they found were chlorine compounds attributed to contamination, but the new research suggests the Viking probes' heat-treatment may have generated these chlorine compounds from naturally occurring Martian organics, destroying them in the process. "This doesn't say anything about the question of whether or not life has existed on Mars, but it could make a big difference in how we look for evidence to answer that question," study co-author Chris McKay, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said in a statement.

Thrust from a Titan 3/Centaur rocket launched NASA's Viking 1 spacecraft on a 505-million-mile journey to Mars on Aug. 20, 1975. Viking 2 followed three weeks later. Each mission included both an orbiter and a lander, and all four components accomplished successes. On July 20, 1976, the Viking 1 lander returned the first photograph taken on the surface of Mars. That lander in a region called Chryse Planitia operated until Nov. 13, 1982. The Viking 2 lander operated in the Utopia Planitia region from Sept. 3, 1976 to April 11, 1980. The orbiters sent home images of the entire planet at resolutions of 300 meters or less per pixel.

There is a new champion on the red planet, in terms of longevity that is, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has surpassed the endurance record of Viking 1. The lander held the record for decades, (the lander was accidentally turned off in 1982 and contact could not be reestablished) until this week when Opportunity surpassed it. The Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been on Mars since 2004 and have provided countless new discoveries about our next door, (celestially speaking) neighbor. The rovers were only expected to last 90 days – and have gone on to last some six years, (Spirit has not communicated with ground controllers and is thought to be in hibernation mode). Spirit may yet wake up and yank the duration-prize from her sister – but until then the prize goes to Opportunity. Much of the twin rovers’ missions successes have gone to this particular rover.

NASA's Viking probes landed on Mars in 1976 to look for water and signs of life. Finding neither, Mars was abandoned for the next two decades. But if Viking 2, which touched down in an equatorial region known as Utopia Planitia, had just dug down into the soil a few more inches, scientists now think it would have hit nearly pure frozen water.

A new analysis of Martian soil data led by University of California, Berkeley, geoscientists suggests that there was once enough water in the planet's atmosphere for a light drizzle or dew to hit the ground, leaving tell-tale signs of its interaction with the planet's surface. The study's conclusion breaks from the more dominant view that the liquid water that once existed during the red planet's infancy came mainly in the form of upwelling groundwater rather than rain. To come up with their conclusions, the UC Berkeley-led researchers used published measurements of soil from Mars that were taken by various NASA missions: Viking 1, Viking 2, Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity. These five missions provided information on soil from widely distant sites surveyed between 1976 and 2006.

One of the more interesting and appealing activities of the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) observational objectives identified in the original 1985 Mars Observer proposal was to image landers on the martian surface. The scientific goal of this objective is to place the landers into their geologic context, which in turn helps the science community to better understand the results from the landers. In addition to this, the MOC team believed that it would be "really neat" to see the landers sitting on the surface. In previous releases, we have shown images of Viking Lander 1, Mars Pathfinder, and the two Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. To this group of landers we can now add with certainty Viking Lander 2 (VL-2), the location of which has been uncertain by many kilometers for nearly 30 years. We also believe that we have found a candidate for the location of the Mars Polar Lander, which failed without a trace on 3 December 1999.

Spherix Incorporated (Nasdaq: SPEX - News) -- One of the persons most relishing the news out of last week's ESA Mars Conference in the Netherlands that 75 percent of the attending scientists now believe that Mars may have had life, and 25 percent saying that Mars may currently have life, is Dr. Gilbert V. Levin. Now working as Executive Officer for Science of Spherix Incorporated, the firm he founded in 1967, Levin was Experimenter on the Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment aboard NASA's 1976 Viking Mission seeking life on Mars.

Aerojet, a GenCorp Inc. (NYSE: GY) company, recently test-fired a Viking flight spare rocket engine assembly in order to help design a new engine which will deliver the next rover to the surface of Mars in 2009. The rocket engine used in the test was originally built, tested and delivered in 1973 for the Viking program. The engine was put into storage after the successful landing of the Viking 1 and Viking 2 spacecraft on Mars in 1976. "Aerojet hardware has flown on every U.S. mission to Mars," said Aerojet President Michael Martin. "We are extremely proud that the hot fire testing of the Viking Lander rocket engine assembly further proved Aerojet's heritage capabilities in design, manufacture, test and production of propulsion systems. Our role in the Mars Science Laboratory mission will bring our work full-circle."

Ray Bucklin can remember when "Mars jars" were sprouting up in laboratories around the country. In the years after the Viking probes landed on the surface of Mars, many scientists spent their spare time building bottle-like devices that replicated the thin air or the surface of the Red Planet — and using them to see whether plants could survive under Martian conditions. Now Bucklin and his graduate students at the UF's Institute of Food and Agricultural Science (UF/IFAS) have put together a Mars jar to beat them all — a room-sized chamber in which the researchers can test models of greenhouses that could one day be built on the Red Planet.

Those twin robots hard at work on Mars have transmitted teasing views that reinforce the prospect that microbial life may exist on the red planet. Results from NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers are being looked over by a legion of planetary experts, including a scientist who remains steadfast that his experiment in 1976 proved the presence of active microbial life in the topsoil of Mars. "All factors necessary to constitute a habitat for life as we know it exist on current-day Mars," explained Gilbert Levin, executive officer for science at Spherix Incorporated of Beltsville, Maryland.

The US Spirit rover on Mars has seen a UFO streak across the Red Planet sky. Astronomers say it could be the first meteor seen from the surface of another world, or a redundant orbiting spacecraft sent to Mars 30 years ago.