Why NASA still believes we might find life on Mars

[rdunk]

The "subject statement" is maybe a bit esoteric, doncha think......for NASA? I don't recall a NASA "rant" ever about their believing that there IS LIFE ON MARS! But, now that maybe is changing?? Does a "positive possibility" of life now give NASA more basis for increased mission budgeting to actually look for it?

I wonder if they have even actually looked at their own photos, which do give extensive proof of life on Mars - at some point in time?? Obviously not, as there have been no open revelations of their having seen "life" in their photos.

This today's news article is interesting, as a NASA rep discusses his thoughts of life on Mars, at the radioactive carbon level, which he saw from test result from the Viking Lander in 1976. 

The Washington Post
By Sarah Kaplan July 30 at 11:20 AM

The day Gil Levin says he detected life on Mars, he was waiting in his lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, watching a piece of paper inch out of a printer.

Levin snatched the sheet and scrutinized the freshly inked graph. A thin line measuring radioactive carbon crept steadily upward, just as it always did when Levin performed the test with microbes on Earth. But this data came from tens of millions of miles away, where NASA's Viking lander was — for the first time in history — conducting an experiment on the surface of Mars.

"Gil, that's life," his co-investigator, Patricia Straat, exclaimed when she saw the first results come in. There was jubilation at JPL. Afterward, Levin said, he drove into the mountains above Los Angeles, sat on the ground and stared up at the night sky.

"I was sort of trembling, you know?" he recalled. It was July 30, 1976.

Forty years later, Levin and Straat still believe that their experiment was evidence of microbiotic Martians. But few people agree with them. To NASA, and to most scientists, the 1976 Viking mission was a technical triumph but a biological bust. Scientists, such as Carl Sagan, who had wagered that large organisms "are not only possible on Mars; they may be favored," were disappointed to see images the lander sent back of a dry, barren planet. Two experiments aimed at finding life turned up negative, and NASA concluded that the results of Levin's test, called the Labeled Release experiment, could be explained by chemical processes rather than biological ones.


The below link also has a short video about human travel to Mars by Jim Green, head of NASA's Planetary Science Division.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/07/30/why-nasa-still-believes-we-might-find-life-on-mars/