Good News for Mars Life Hunt? Rover Digs Up Microbes in Chilean Desert

[Judi Lynn]

By Mike Wall 15 hours ago




A trial rover exploring Chile's Mars-like Atacama Desert.(Image: © Stephen B. Pointing)
Drilling for signs of life on Mars, as two rover missions plan to do soon, is a pretty sound strategy, a new study suggests.

An autonomous rover managed to dig up subsurface microbial life during a trial mission in Chile's cold and dry Atacama Desert, a frequent Red Planet stand-in.

"We have shown that a robotic rover can recover subsurface soil in the most Mars-like desert on Earth," study co-author Stephen Pointing, a professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, said in a statement.

"This is important, because most scientists agree that any life on Mars would have to occur below the surface to escape the harsh surface conditions where high radiation, low temperature and lack of water make life unlikely," Pointing said.

More:
https://www.space.com/digging-mars-life-strategy-atacama-desert.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. Simulated Mission in Chilean Desert Shows How a Rover Could Detect Life on Mars

George Dvorsky
Today 5:00am

By using the barren Atacama Desert in Chile as a stand-in for Mars, researchers have shown that it’s possible to use an autonomous rover-mounted drill to detect life beneath a desolate surface. Encouragingly, the test resulted in the discovery of a resilient microorganism—exactly the kind of creature that could lurk deep beneath the Martian surface.

New research published today in Frontiers in Microbiology describes a trial NASA rover mission in Chile’s Atacama Desert that could mirror a future mission to Mars. The experimental rover and drill, designed by Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and funded by NASA, successfully recovered microorganisms beneath the surface—specifically, a hardy, salt-resistant bacteria. The test provided justification for a life-hunting mission to Mars, but the experiment was not without its challenges and limitations. As the new research showed, finding life on Mars—if it even exists—will require some serious technological innovations, a lot of cash, and a bit of luck.

Billions of years ago, Mars featured a temperate climate and liquid water at its surface, providing a potential environment for life to emerge. Today, life is unlikely to exist at the surface. Lethal levels of radiation bathe the Red Planet, and its tortured surface contains scant traces of liquid water. During the Martian summer, daytime temperatures near the equator can reach a balmy 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius), but at night drop to a frighteningly cold -148 degrees F (-100 degrees C).

Conditions beneath the surface are a different story, according to Stephen Pointing, a researcher at Yale-NUS College in Singapore and the lead author of the new study. Just below the surface, rocks and sediment provide shelter from the extreme conditions above, providing a potential habitat for life.

More:
https://gizmodo.com/simulated-mission-in-chilean-desert-shows-how-a-rover-c-1832928361