False reports claim Nasa destroyed proof of alien life on Mars

There almost certainly wasn't any such proof to destroy

The base of Mars' Mount Sharp - the rover's eventual science destination - is pictured in this August 27, 2012 NASA handout photo taken by the Curiosity rover (REUTERS/NASA/Handout)

Nasa has been falsely accused of destroying proof of alien life on Mars.

But despite a huge number of reports to the contrary, there was no proof of aliens, and Nasa might not even have destroyed anything relevant.

In truth, the report was looking at why organic molecules – an important building block of life – were only found recently when the space agency had explored the surface of the planet decades ago. It revealed that might have been the result of a slip-up by Nasa, when it burnt away those molecules during the testing process.

But there is no truth to the claim that Nasa destroyed proof of alien life – because the agency did not have it in the first place. Those organic molecules are important parts of the building blocks of life, but they are not aliens themselves.

And the molecules themselves might not even have been there. In fact, the report speculated that the reason Nasa's Viking mission failed to find the molecules – despite searching for things that we now know are there – was because they were burnt away during the testing process.

Despite all of that number of reports claimed that Nasa had found evidence of aliens on Mars and then accidentally destroyed it.

"Life on Mars? NASA may have accidentally BURNED evidence of aliens on the red planet almost 50 years ago," read one headline. "NASA may have 'accidentally BURNED' evidence of life on Mars 40 years ago, says study," another said.

The controversy arrived because of a new report that study that looked to explain the mystery of why the Viking mission's on-board Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer, which was intended to look for proof of organic molecules, failed to actually find them. The twin Viking spacecraft's primary goal was to test whether life could survive on Mars, and their results were surprisingly pessimistic.

To solve the mystery of why it failed to find those organic molecules, or building blocks of life, the new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research suggested that it could be the result of a mistake in the testing process that burnt them away.

It is important to note, however, that the building blocks of life are entirely distinct from the life itself. Even now, Nasa has never reported evidence of life anywhere else in the universe – despite having found those building blocks in a range of different places.