Finding life in the Atacama Desert
A robotic rover identified signs of life in the Atacama Desert — one of the most inhospitable regions on Earth. The successful project could contribute to the search for life on other planets.
Jeremy McGovern
 The image on the left shows an RGB view of a rock taken by the "Life in the Atacama" detection system. The image on the right shows fluorescent signal from chlorophyll on the rock. Carnegie Mellon University [View Larger Image] |
| March 17, 2005
Running from the Pacific Ocean to the Andes Mountains, the Atacama Desert is a sparsely populated Chilean plateau that receives almost no precipitation. Because of the Atacama's arid state, scientists have used this region as a test site for technology used in future Mars missions. For the first time, an automated rover program has identified life in the desert. Carnegie Mellon University scientists developed the "Life in the Atacama" project for NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP). Its goal is to understand how a remotely controlled rover can detect life by subjecting the machinery to harsh conditions. Despite the Atacama's inhospitable nature, the rover's instruments identified lichens and bacterial colonies at humid, coastal, and dry interior sites. "We saw very clear signals from chlorophyll, DNA, and protein, and we were able to visually identify biological materials from a standard image captured by the rover," explained Alan Waggoner of Carnegie's Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center. "Taken together, these four pieces of evidence are strong indicators of life," The rover's imager recognizes fluorescent signals from a set of dyes that light up when bound to any of these molecules of life: nucleic acid, protein, lipid, or carbohydrate. During the mission, a remote science team at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh guided the rover. At the Atacama site, another team gathered samples studied by the rover. These samples were returned to a lab for examination, where all samples identified by the rover possessed bacteria. With the extreme levels of ultraviolet radiation in the Atacama Desert, the team will analyze the collected samples to study the bacteria's resistance to (UV) radiation. The next phase in the three-year ASTEP project is to conduct further experiments with Zoe, a new robot developed using data derived from Atacama experiments. |
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