Pat Straat

"Is there Life on Mars?"

ABSTRACT -- Dr. Straat will address the question "Is there life on Mars?" based on her recently published book To Mars With Love. The book is the behind-the-scenes story of the Viking Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment, one of three life detection experiments that landed on the surface of Mars during the 1976 Viking Mission. Dr. Straat worked hand-in-hand with the engineers building the Viking Biology Instrument. She recounts the challenges, crises, and the humor involved in getting the LR to Mars, as well as the unfolding of the mission as the surprising and controversial positive LR results were received from Mars.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Patricia Ann Straat was Co-Experimenter of the Labeled Release life detection experiment and member of the Biology Flight Team during NASA's 1976 Viking Mission, the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars. She was also a Team Member of the Spectroscopy experiment on the 1971 Mariner 9 Mission to Mars, which was the first spacecraft to orbit Mars.

Dr. Straat earned her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College and her doctorate in biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University. After four postdoctoral years in the Department of Radiological Sciences at Hopkins' School of Hygiene and Public Health (now the Bloomburg School of Public Health), she became an Assistant Professor in that same department for two years.

She joined Gilbert Levin (LR Experimenter) at Biospherics Incorporated in 1970 where she began her work with Mars and the Labeled Release experiment. Following Viking, she joined the National Institutes of Health as a health scientist administrator, retiring in 2001.

She recently published To Mars With Love, a book that was 40 years in the making and is the behind-the-scenes story of the Viking Labeled Release experiment, see https://www.tomarswithlove.com/.

Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov