The Second Test - The Microbes' Perfect Lunch

Two of Viking's experiments were thus pointing to the existence of life. If that was the case, why did they change their minds? A third experiment pointed the other way. The gas chromatograph mass spectrometer or g c m s didn't work properly. It mixed a scientist's version of chicken soup with martian soil analyzing the gases given off and concluded the soil contained nothing that had thrived on the nutrients. So you had two experiments saying life, and one experiment saying, we didn't find which is not the same thing as saying it's not there, just that we didn't found it.