In between the mould and clumps of yellow bacteria lay a host of dead microbes.
In 1996 there was an announcement by Nasa that they had found dead microbes in a meteorite that had come from Mars.
But a tiny amount of oxygen remained behind because some of the organic matter from the dead microbes sank from the surface of the ocean to the sea floor, where oxygen couldn't react with it.
This methodology (hereafter referred to as the ATP assay), which measures ATP associated with living and dead microbes, has not currently been approved by NASA as an alternative to the spore assay for determining overall microbial contamination of spacecraft.
There, in the shadow of the bloated stripy gasbag Jupiter, could be actual living organisms – not the desiccated and irradiated remnants of long dead microbes that scientists hope to find on the red planet.
Not the dead microbes supposedly entombed in a meteorite, but metabolizing Martians that were still kicking.
Molecular methods, such as those based on polymerase chain reaction (PCR), can considerably accelerate the turnaround of results but cannot distinguish between live and dead microbes, severely limiting the usefulness of these methods.
Last year, structural biologists Thomas Steitz and Nenad Ban and biochemist Peter Moore of Yale University unveiled a fuzzy picture of the larger subunit of the Dead Sea microbe Haloarcula marismortui (ScienceNOW, 26 August 1999).
But were the seductive squiggles seen under the microscope really dead Red Planet microbes, or were they just inanimate features that mimicked croaked critters?
In the unautoclaved dead poplar controls, microbes associated with the roots were considered to be active.
