Laboratory studies on complex organic molecules on Mars: Part 1 - Rationale

The search for organic molecules and traces of life is the future perspective of several missions to Mars. In order to know what those mission should be looking for, laboratory experiments under simulated Mars conditions are necessary. Especially since the Viking mission did not find any traces of organic compounds in the Martian soil. In this paper the history of the search for life on Mars and the context of our laboratory studies, are described. Furthermore it gives a short description of the experiments. This paper is the first part of a series of three papers. The second paper will describe the experiments and methods, the third paper will be a status report. Both the second and the third paper can be found in the proceedings of the Second European Workshop on Exo/Astrobiology, ESA Special Publication SP-518.