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

Re:Contamination probably

[Wavicle]

The Atacama receives a very small amount of water in the form of fog or dew. Although the Atacama is very dry, it is not very warm. Something like a million people live in the Atacama. In some particularly dry spots, they live from the water collected by giant "fog collectors".

Re:IANABiologist

[flyingsquid]

Why would life on mars necessarily be DNA-based, and why would protiens and lipids nessarily evolve if life evolves? Certainly, other methods of reproduction may have evolved.

One possibility is that the Martian life and Earth life are related. If rocks can be blown off the surface of Mars and land here- and presumably, vice-versa- it's quite possible that in the early days around 3-4 billion years ago, impact ejecta formed a sort of interplanetary shuttle service for microbes. If Mars became habitable before Earth, it's even possible life actually evolved there, and then was seeded here.