Who they are
Norman Horowitz was a Caltech biologist and former head of JPL’s Bioscience Section who led Viking’s Pyrolytic Release experiment. He also wrote about the search for life in the Solar System. His work belongs to the history of testing Martian soil, where mission success and unexpected chemical activity did not amount to definitive detection of living microorganisms.
He represents one of the named experiment leaders in the Viking life-detection effort.
Selected contributions
- Led the Pyrolytic Release experiment in Viking’s biology program.Source ↗
- Authored To Utopia and Back, a 1986 account of the search for life in the Solar System.Source ↗Source 2 ↗
Selected works
Book · 1986
To Utopia and Back: The Search for Life in the Solar System
Horowitz examines the search for life in the Solar System from the perspective of a biologist involved in Mars missions. The available chapter discusses how observations of Mars were interpreted before spacecraft measurements changed the debate.
Reading scope & citation
Library bibliographic metadata and Caltech’s authorized chapter introduction/opening passages read; complete book not read.
ISBN: 0716717662
In the timeline
- Jul 20, 1976Viking lands laboratories to test Martian soil
Biography sources & portrait credit
- Viking Project and Astrobiology ↗NASA Science
- To Utopia and Back: The Search for Life in the Solar System ↗W. H. Freeman; Indiana University Libraries catalogue
- Mars: Myth and Reality ↗Engineering & Science, California Institute of Technology
Portrait credit
Unknown photographer. Public domain (Commons file-specific copyright declaration). Via Wikimedia Commons.
Photograph. Cropped to 4:5, resized to 320 × 400 and converted to WebP.
Image source & identification ↗ · Public domain (Commons file-specific copyright declaration) ↗
