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."

Comments

How deep can it drill?

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the serious speculation that I have read is that life may exist well under the surface.

Life on mars bit

[PxM]

It should be noted that the claim about whether life on Mars exists is not without contrevery. Levin contends that the Viking probes did detect evidence of life on Mars based on biochemical signatures. This past evidence is now supported by the belief that Mars might have an organic methane source. There is also some evidence that Viking detected a circadian rhythm, but like all conclusions draw on such a limited data set, there are a lot of interpretations.

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Re:How much does this cost?

[TeaQuaffer]

Zoë is 1x2x2 meters (h, w, l) and was developed by Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute with 3 or 4 million in NASA grants more info here

Re:second look at life on Mars?

[mbrother]

Yes, you're right that the Viking experiments on Mars were not unanimous about not detecting life. At least one of them did, but in the absence of the other experiments supporting the result, consensus drifted toward "unusual chemistry" to explain it. But that's not a complete consensus by any means. Here's one link about on the pro-life side: http://mars.spherix.com/

Re:how dry is dry?

[double-oh three]

Huh? Even the site you linked says it does rain from time to time, just rarely.

"The annual rainfall (or lack of it) defines a desert, but that doesn't mean that it never rains in Atacama. "

I've been there

[hey!]

It is incredibly dry.Along the coast, there is some very sparse plant life sustained by camachaca -- a mist that blows in off the sea for a few hours in the morning. Except at a few places like Pan de Azucar national park the camachaca doesn't reach very far inland, so plant life drops of dramatically within a km of the coast. A brief hike inland brings you to a blasted, arid, and apprenlty sterile moonscape. I liked to jog inland in the cool, bright and dry early morning.

If you're anywhere near habitation, it's not unusual to see bits of garbage and bits of toilet paper from campers blowing around -- without moisture to break it down it hangs around forever. Archaeologists have found Inca textiles that had been dropped in the Atacama desert that after 500 year were in nearly perfect condition.

When I was there, it had been over five years since the last rainfall. Yet the following year, they had a small rain storm. My relatives, who were doing research there, said that within days the desert was completely covered with tiny, colorful flowers. My sister in law said that if you walked among them, the fragence was so overpoweringly sweet it made you retch. And of couse this display wasn't intended for humans -- it was for the vast clouds of insects that emerged from the apparently sterile soil to pollinate the flowers.

Obviously, there is a tremendous amount of life latent in the soil. There is a huge difference between a few inches of rain per decade and no rain at all.