"After landing on the Red Planet in 1976, NASA's Viking landers may have sampled tiny, dry-resistant life-forms hiding inside Martian rocks..." by Harry Baker via Space.com One researcher hypothesizes that experiments carried out by NASA's Viking landers in 1976 could have inadvertently killed microbes living in Martian rocks. Other experts are skeptical. A scientist recently claimed that NASA may have inadvertently discovered life on Mars almost 50 years ago and then accidentally killed it before realizing what it was. But other experts are split on whether the new claims are a far-fetched fantasy or an intriguing possible explanation for some puzzling past experiments. After landing on the Red Planet in 1976, NASA's Viking landers may have sampled tiny, dry-resistant life-forms hiding inside Martian rocks, Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Technical University Berlin, suggested in a June 27 article for Big Think. If these extreme life-forms did and continue to exist, the