NASA Is Testing Its Alien-Detecting Tools in Chile’s Atacama Desert

[Judi Lynn]

NASA Is Testing Its Alien-Detecting Tools in Chile’s Atacama Desert

Written by
Becky Ferreira
Contributor


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“Penitentes,” unusual snow and ice formations, in Atacama Desert.
Image: European Southern Observatory
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28 February 2016 // 08:00 PM CET

With its dry climate and high elevation, the Atacama Desert plateau in Chile is one of the best locations on Earth for stargazing. A major hub for astronomical research, the region will soon to be home to the largest ground telescope ever built—a facility so sensitive that it may be able to detect signs of life in the atmospheres of alien worlds.

But it’s not just the skies above the Atacama Desert that stand to revolutionize our search for extraterrestrial life. It’s also the ground below. Often called the driest place in the world and the subject of punishing ultraviolet radiation, the Atacama Desert is about the closest environment to Mars that you can get, short of schlepping over to the Red Planet.

That’s why NASA has been sending expeditions to the desert to field test new life-detecting instruments that will hopefully be bundled into future Martian missions. The latest project— Atacama Rover Astrobiology Drilling Studies (ARADS)—just wrapped its first deployment to Yungay Station, where conditions are particularly reminiscent of Mars.

The ARADs team spent a month braving the bone-dry, gusty environment during the hot Southern hemisphere summer, in order to work out the kinks in NASA’s life-detecting toolkit. During their stay, the researchers ran experiments with a Mars-prototype drill, a sample transfer arm, a Signs of Life Detector (SOLID) developed in Spain, and a mock-up of the Wet Chemistry Laboratory (WCL) that accompanied the Phoenix lander to the Martian surface in 2008.

More:
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/nasa-is-practicing-its-alien-detecting-tools-in-chiles-atacama-desert

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[DetlefK]

1. I have read about those ice-formations.

They form with a complex interplay of a sublimation-resublimation process and a process where the cones act as lenses directing sunlight into their own ice-core.