A ROBOTIC rover has detected living organisms in the driest and most barren place on Earth, the Atacama desert in Chile. A similar rover could one day look for life on Mars.
A team led by Nathalie Cabrol of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, along with roboticists from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, used a 1-metre-tall, four-wheeled rover called Zoe to explore a site in the heart of the Atacama desert. To simulate operating a rover on Mars, the vehicle was controlled remotely from Pittsburgh. The controllers were not told exactly where Zoe had “landed”, only that it was somewhere within a large “landing…
