PRESIDENT Clinton pledged the full resources of the United States space programme to seeking life on Mars, as a group of scientists claimed they may have found evidence that it once existed.
A clearly excited Mr Clinton hailed the findings as having "implications as far reaching and awe inspiring as can be imagined. He has asked the Vice President, Mr Al Gore, to convene a "space summit" at the White House before the end of the year.
The bipartisan summit will discuss how to pursue the questions raised by the findings of the researchers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and three universities. About the same time as the summit, a new probe of Mars will be launched in a spacecraft timed to arrive on July 4th, Independence Day, to collect soil samples.
The researchers presented theirs findings at a press conference at NASA headquarters in Washington but warned that they were still not conclusive. Mr Daniel Goldin of NASA, who had earlier cautioned that "we are not talking about little green men here", said yesterday that it would be up to the scientific world to "validate" this claim that life had existed on Mars. The claim is based on a 30 month study of a potato sized meteorite knocked from Mars about 15 million years ago which went into orbit around the Sun and fell on the Antarctic region about 13,000 years ago. It was found by a US team in 1984.
But the new development is that they also claim that the small rock, called Allan Hills 84001, contains tiny organic molecules associated with life processes. However, their work on these polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) is being challenged by other scientists.
"The conclusion is at best mature and more probably wrong, said a planetary scientist at the University of California, San Diego, Dr John Kerridge. "This is much less than 100 per cent sure."
Carl Sagan, the renowned astronomer and an authority on the search for extra terrestrial life, was both excited and cautious. He warned that the existence of the organic chemicals in the meteorite were not the same as proof of life.
The findings will be made fully available to the world scientific community in the next issue of the journal Science. But Dr William Schopf, a scientist from the University of California invited to give his views at the NASA press conference, said that it was "probably unlikely" that the PAHs were evidence of biological existence on Mars. He found the research "exciting and interesting" but much more work would have to be done before it proved there had been life on Mars.
President Clinton also cautioned that the findings must first be confirmed by other scientists but if they were, the discovery "will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered". He was determined that "the American space programme will put its full intellectual power and technological prowess behind the search for further evidence of life on Mars."
The co authors of the study on the meteorite were David McKay and Everett Gibson of the Johnson Space Centre, Houston; Kathie Thomas Keprta of Lockheed Martin; Hojatollah Vali of McGill University in Montreal; Christopher Romanek of the University of Georgia; and Simon Clemell, Xavier Chillier, Claude Maechlin and Richard Zare of Stanford University, California.