Wolf Vishniac

Wolf Vishniac

Wolf Vishniac‘s experiments were removed from the NASA Martian program. Many others in his place might have stalked off the Viking Biology Team. But Vishniac was a gentle and delicate man. He decided instead that he could best serve the search for life on Mars by voyaging to the most Mars-like environment on Earth – the dry valleys of Antarctica. Some previous investigators had examined Antarctic soil and decided that the few microbes they were able to find were not really natives of the dry valleys, but had been blown there from other, more clement environments. Recalling the Mars Jars experiments, Vishniac believed that life was tenacious and that Antarctica was perfectly consistent with microbiology. If terrestrial bugs could live on Mars, he thought, why not in Antarctica – which was by any large warmer, wetter, and had more oxygen and much less ultraviolet light. Conversely, finding life in Antarctic dry valleys would correspondingly improve, he thought, the chances of life on Mars. Vishniac believed that the experimental techniques previously used to deduce no indigenous microbes in Antarctica were flawed. The nutrients, while suitable for the comfortable environment of a university microbiology laboratory, were not designed for the arid polar wastlend.

So on Novembre 8, 1973, Vishniac, his new microbiology equipment and a geologist companion were transported by helicopter from McMurdo Station to an area near Mount Balder, a dry valley in the Asgard range. His practice was to implant the little microbiology stations in the Antarctic soil and return about a month later to retrieve them. On Decmeber 10, 1973, he left to gather samples on Mount Baldeer; his departure was photographed from about three kilometers away. It was the last time anyone saw him alive. Eighteen hours later, his body was discovered at the base of a cliff of ice. He had wandered into an area not previously explored, had apparently slipped on the ice and tumbled and bounced for a distance of 150 meters. Perhaps something had caught his eye, a likely habitat for microbes, say, or a patch of green where none should be. We will never know. In the small brown notebook he was carrying that day, the last entry reads, “Station 202 retrieved. 10 December 1973, 2230 hours. Soil temperature, – 10 degree. Air temperature – 16 degree. » It had been a typical summer temperature for Mars.

The Life is Tenacious. Photo by Elena

Many of Bisniac’s microbiology stations are still sitting in Antarctica. But the samples that were returned were examined, using his methods, by his professional colleagues and friends. A wide variety of microbes, which would have been indetectable with conventional scoring techniques, was found in essentially every site examined. A new species of yeast, apparently unique to Antarctica, as discovered in his samples by his widow, Helen Simpson Vishniac. Large rocks returned from Antarctica in the expedition, examined by Imre Friedmann, turno out to have a fascinating microbiology – one or two millimeters inside the rock, algae have colonized a tiny world in which small quantities of water are trapped and made liquid. On Mars such a place would be even more interesting, because while the visible light necessary for photosynthesis would penetrate to that depth, the germicidal ultraviolet light would be at least partially attenuated.

Because the design of space missions is finalized many years before launch, and because of Visniac’s death, the results of his Antarctic experiments did not influence the Viking design for seeking Martian life. In general, the microbiology experiments were not carried out at the low ambient Martian temperatures, and most did not provide long incubation times. The all made farily strong assumptions about what Martian metabolism had to be like. There was no wat to look for life inside the rocks.