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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.
A lot of the serious speculation that I have read is that life may exist well under the surface.
Just an interesting tidbit, it has not rained in the Atacama desert for 100s of years.
http://www.extremescience.com/DriestPlace.htm
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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.
This sig is false.
The big question is will they find life on Earth?
...we can start looking for intelligent beings.
I can't believe it.. must be a software error...
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know how much was spent to create this robot? Or, how big is it (the pictures make it look small, but they can be deceiving)? I'm just curious about the likelihood of devices like this going to Mars any time soon.
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They're sending mars landers to a desert now?
Yeah, thats cheap... I guess NASA's budget has been cut again.
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You don't want to disturb the natives on Mars. I know I don't want to listen to Hank Williams music to get rid of them should we make them angry.
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The Atacama desert is in this region. I think that link will work, at least it did on my machine.
"Lichens are symbiotic organisms made up by the association of microscopic green algae or cyanobacteria and filamentous fungi."
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Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
Autonomous Robot Finds Life in Atacama Desert
"The robot, named Zoe, escaped from a Palo Alto robotics research laboratory earlier this year. Scientists assumed it was lost until tourists photographed it in a remote part of the Atacama desert this week. In a statement to the police the robot said "I'm not going back to the lab. I've made friends out here, why would I leave?"
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.
Let me get this straight, these robots failed to detect life on earth, yet we spend billions of dollars to send them to Mars where they would, once again, fail to find life? Hurrah for the federal bureaucracy!
-py
Whatever happened with that study about the chemical reactions they found on Mars - and thought was life at first - following the day-cycle (the 25 hours of sunlight on Mars or something similar)? I thought the verdict was still out on this?
dahlek (will you squirm when you are pecked
Good thing they didn't demo the device before Congress: there's certainly no intelligent life to detect there.
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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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Moisture is probably more than enough to sustain lichen and bacteria colony. Especially that this does not get that hot (link from article say it all) and part are even snowy due to altitude. Actually it may be the driest desert but not the hotest. So getting water might be a problem but eveaporation mightnot be the biggest problem. Heck, even in sahara, where you have mostly sand, you have life.
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Because they went out on a Saturday night.
During the week, the Atacama desert is really dead.
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."
Yes, it's true. NASA has completely revamped every single engineering process from the ground up so that now they are extremely capable and successful at lowering the bar and setting subterranean expectations so that pretty much no matter what happens it was a resounding success. Why didn't they think of that before?!?! Next up: NASA draws upon collective knowledge of the entire bag of hammers to repair/replace Hubble whilst Chinese successfully land a man on the moon using only firecrackers and drink umbrellas.
"The robot could also spray special dyes to detect life signatures like DNA, protein, lipids, and carbohydrates."
Hopefully they are non-toxic. Otherwise "Good news: we found life. Bad news: we just killed it". Especially if you are looking for life in difficult landscapes you don't know how endangered something is.
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So the Atacama is similar to Mars? Well both may be dry, but the Atacama temperature range is 0..25'C, and Mars is, well, a lot colder?
Don't just assume this robot will function correctly on Mars at Martian temperatures (or even after the space travel at inter-stellar temperatures (let a alone the radiation)), or that its various detection methods that function happily in the -10..+35'C zone will work happily at Martian temperatures and atmospheric pressures.
Interesting that the article didn't mention either of these, and a quick scan of the Slashdot replies missed these relatively obvious problems.
Building spray-painting robot ?
That must be Will Smith !
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i'm just wondering why is it that when probes and satalights and robots takes ages to goto the other planets in are system that they don't send a whole load at once? I mean if it is because we can only send up a certin size and weight why don't we brake up a probe into smaller bits and send each bit up into orbit like we do with the station? then when all the bits are up there we just strap them together and send the whole load off that way even if one or two bots or devices don't work some will and we would have not wasted the months or years it tock to get there?
If the history of space travel has told us anything, it's that getting the robot to Mars is the easy part. Getting it to work once it's there is another matter.
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.
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I thought the idea of a fog collector was cool, so I did a little more research into the indigenous people. They wear face masks while outside to protect themselves from the elements. Here's a picture.
Or, for Mac users, umlauts are just u followed by the letter in question, acute accents are e followed by the letter, grave accents are ` followed by the letter, circumflex are i followed by the letter, and esszetts are simply s.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
As others have pointed out, it's only some parts of the Atacama that haven't had rain in hundreds of years. It stretches from the coast to the Andes, so it's big enough for some rain to occur.
In fact, a wonderful event happens every once in a while. Some seeds remain dormant in the sand, and when it rains, they are revived, and thousands of flowers suddenly blossom covering large patches of desert. We call it "desierto florido" (the flowering desert, look it up, here's an english link). It's really quite remarkable.
- PeeCee
The last existing colony of life in Chile's barren Atacama Desert was located and extinguished today when CMU's robotic rover 'Zoe' sprayed four special dyes on it. However, to the joy of researchers and art lovers, the formerly living mater then took on a pleasing fluorescent glow.
NASA has ordered two for the next Mars mission.
In related news, Vulcan industries has expressed an interest in licensing the technology to disinfect commercial kitchen floors.
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Crap. My (opt-) got filtered out.
That was opt-u, opt-e, opt-`, opt-i, and opt-s.
Just ignore this posting and the one above.
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www.fogbound.net
But remember, the scientists here probably expected to find life, which could have influenced their analysis. Off Topic: I wonder if Nature's web site is down because of all the traffic from Slashdot...
I am quite aware of how to add umlauts (I write in german quite often), but the *average* people that I know have aren't aware how to pronounce them correctly let alone insert them using alt-codes or some equivlent.
Data: "I would be happy to, sir. I just love scanning for life forms!
Life forms! **** You tiny little life forms! **** You precious little life forms! ***** Where are you? *********"
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
But does it run Linux?
But it's all gone now since some stupid, dye-spraying robot came in and killed everything.
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Cool! Let's hack it to find intelligent life in a managers meeting.
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In what way is it similar to Mars? It has a breathable, oxygen atmosphere, there is water vapour in that atmosphere, even if not much, the gravity is almost twice as strong. There's some vegetation and at least bacterial life there (as there is even in the driest of deserts). The temperature is conservatively 400 degrees higher in the desert than on Mars.
Whereas none of the above applies to Mars. So they are, in fact, completely different. Who is it who "is thought" to believe it to be like Mars?