NASA Researches Mars in the Desert

Four pieces of published science about the sky and the desert we work in, each summarisedand followed by its source.

Read 3

Between 2016 and 2019, NASA ran four field campaigns in the hyperarid core of the Atacama to rehearse the search for life on Mars. The project was called ARADS, the Atacama Rover Astrobiology Drilling Studies, and its results were summarised by Brian Glass and colleagues in the journal Astrobiology in 2023.

The team worked around Estación Yungay, about 80 kilometres southeast of Antofagasta, where mean annual rainfall is under 2 millimetres and the soil holds very little organic matter. Those conditions make it one of the closest matches to Mars on Earth. Even so, microbes survive below the surface, inside salt deposits.

ARADS combined a 300-kilogram rover, KREX2, with a one-metre drill, a robotic arm descended from the Phoenix and InSight landers, and life-detection instruments from NASA and from Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología. One instrument found microbial biosignatures whose pattern changed with depth. Another identified amino acids in drilled samples at parts-per-billion sensitivity.

In 2019 the whole system was operated from NASA Ames in California on a Mars-style schedule of two communication windows a day, at a site the team had never studied. The work showed that a rover can drill, transfer and analyse samples largely on its own, and that keeping those samples free of contamination is essential and demanding.

SOURCE

B. Glass et al., “The Atacama Rover Astrobiology Drilling Studies (ARADS) Project,” Astrobiology 23(12), 1245–1258, December 2023. DOI 10.1089/ast.2022.0126. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10750311/