How many tests has the gas chromatograph made?
Margulis: As far as I know it’s made two. One is a low temperature run with stuff pyrolyzed – that is it’s heated up without oxygen – and that gets almost all of the not very-tightly-bound organics. That would give off all your amino acids and all kinds of small organic acids, if you ran it on an arbitrary soil sample on the Earth. And then they did a high temperature run, I think at 600 degrees C, which will break up organic goop, tars and things they call kerogen and humic acids. High molecular weight incomprehensible materials get broken down into component parts, and you never know what the high molecular weight stuff is but you know what it yields. Both those runs were done with internal controls on them to be sure the instrument is working, and the instrument is definitely working. For example the instrument is seeing background atmospheric gases the same as the entry probes did, so it’s definitely seeing things that are there. It’s essentially seen no carbon except oxidized carb
