Washington: Refurbishing claims of life on Mars, the US space agency, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), has said that it did find signs of existence on the planet during the historic Viking landings of 1976.

According to former mission scientist, Dr Gil Levin, there is currently evidence to prove about the existence of life on the Red Planet, even as the US and Europe despatch expeditions there.

Over the decades, the United States and Russia have already spent billions on a handful of spacecraft designed to make a landing on Mars. With only three having tasted success so far - the two Viking probes in the 1970s and Mars Pathfinder in 1997, there is hope pinned on the new expedition.

Prior to the announcement, NASA carried out comprehensive tests to hunt for evidence of organic matter. However, the Viking experiments failed to find this essential stuff of life and it was concluded that Mars was a dead planet.

New evidence, concluded from experiments conducted by Levin, points to the existence of live micro- organisms in the surface soil of Mars.

"The organic analysis instrument was shown to be very insensitive, requiring millions of micro-organisms to detect any organic matter versus the LR's demonstrated ability to detect as few as 50 micro- organisms," Levin was quoted as saying, in an interview to BBC News Online.

Travelling to Mars this summer to hunt signs of life, is the British-built Beagle 2, which will be deposited on the Martian surface by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft.

However, Levin decries it as a 'risky strategy', which in spite of its billing, carries no life detection experiment and goes on to further state that neither its organic detector nor its isotopic analysis instrument can provide evidence for living organisms.

Claims of life on Mars have always proved highly contentious, and 20 years after Viking, microbe-like structures discovered inside a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica, unravelled hopes that were later quashed.

Till then, one can only brood over astronomer Carl Sagan's dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And there is no reason to believe that anything found this time will be any different.

ANI