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YM COLUMN ARCHIVE

December 2, 2009

New evidence of the trace of living organism found in the meteorite from Mars?

It was 1996 when NASA and White House made a headline-making announcement that they found the trace of living organism in the Martian meteorite that fell on the Antarctic Pole. At that time I remember I was having a camp with children in Hokkaido. I had a report by international telephone at midnight from my former secretary who was then traveling the USA saying, “Big news! NASA is having a press conference of fantastic discovery.” It was really a shocking news for me completely awoken.

The meteorite was named “Allen Hills 84001”. It was a fragment of the meteorite originated from Mars with weight of a little less than 2kg, which was one of more than seven thousand meteorites found at Allen Hills in December 1984 by the field investigation team of the Antarctic Meteorite Exploration Project. From within the meteorite was found something that appeared to be the microscopic fossil of living organism.

Allen Hills 84001 was produced from Martian lava of 3.6 billion years earlier, and flied out of Mars into space when the asteroids collided with Mars during the period between 1.3 and 1.6 million years ago. After having wandered in space for longer than 10 million years, they were presumed to have fallen on the South Pole region of earth about thirteen thousand years ago.

In the electron microscope photograph publicly released in 1996 is seen something like microorganic debris of chain-like structure. Its diameter is 20~100 nanometers. The name of discoverer, Dr. David Mckay, became known world wide at once. Ever since then controversial discussions mainly led by microbiologists have been going on everywhere in the world as to if or not the chain-like structure is the trace of living organism. No conclusion seems to be reached yet.

Quite recently, however, a magazine journal “Spaceflight Now” has reported that the positive evidence of trace of living organism was found in Allen Hills meteorite thanks to drastic improvement of far advanced electronic microscope. The advocates of the opinion are reported as boasting that the newly discovered evidence can beat any argumentation regarding the photograph of 1996.

This opinion has been presented in a science journal “Geochimica et Cosmochimica” of the Geochemical and Meteoritic Society in the long report over forty-six pages. I don’t have it yet. The writers are scientists all belonging to Johnson Space Center: they are Kathie Thomas-Keprta (main writer), David Mackay (first discoverer sixteen years ago), Everett Gibson and Susan Wentworth. It is reported that its details will be officially announced at NASA’s press interview before long. I’m really looking forward to its interview and longing to see the electron microscope photograph in question.

I welcome your opinions on this column to the following E-mail address.
matogawa@planetary.or.jp

(Translated by The Planetary Society of Japan)