However, for years, scientists have argued that the Viking's experimental techniques might’ve killed hygroscopic microbes living on Mars with too much water. While impossible to know for sure, this theory could be proven true or false if NASA sends another dedicated mission to detect biological life on Mars.

Astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch from the Technische Universität Berlin in Germany believes that humans may have unintentionally killed all life on Mars in the 1970s. NASA's Viking 1 mission in 1975 saw two spacecraft land on the Red Planet's surface and conduct an experiment involving mixing water and nutrients with collected soil samples.

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