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Autonomous Robot Finds Life in Atacama Desert
Neil Halelamien writes "Nature and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette report that a NASA-funded "robotic astrobiologist" named Zoë (a successor to the Hyperion rover) has found life in Chile's Atacama desert. The Atacama is the Earth's driest desert, with steep slopes and rugged terrain. This is the first robot to remotely detect life, finding bacteria (and lichens, in the less dry areas) by using a fluorescent imager. The robot could also spray special dyes to detect life signatures like DNA, protein, lipids, and carbohydrates. Zoë's next assignment will be to autonomously sample soil over 50 kilometers of the Atacama. The Atacama desert is thought to be similar to Mars; instruments similar to those used on the 1970s Viking missions have previously failed to detect life there."
Most likely, the researchers who put the robot in the desert didn't wash their feet properly.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
...we can start looking for intelligent beings.
...demands pay rise and more more holidays.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
Good thing they didn't demo the device before Congress: there's certainly no intelligent life to detect there.
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make install -not war
We should send Google to search for life on Mars.
"...The robot could also spray special dyes to detect life signatures like DNA, protein, lipids, and carbohydrates..."
In related news, Atacama tribe sues NASA for building spray-painting robot, spoiling natural habitat of ancient desert. NASA plans bigger robot equipped with boom box and head scarf to verify once and for all that life does not exist there. "Instead of trying to find life, we figured we just keep making our robots more and more annoying until some alien shows up with a ray gun."