Autonomous Robot Finds Life in Atacama Desert

Neil Halelamien writes "Nature and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette report that a NASA-funded "robotic astrobiologist" named Zoë (a successor to the Hyperion rover) has found life in Chile's Atacama desert. The Atacama is the Earth's driest desert, with steep slopes and rugged terrain. This is the first robot to remotely detect life, finding bacteria (and lichens, in the less dry areas) by using a fluorescent imager. The robot could also spray special dyes to detect life signatures like DNA, protein, lipids, and carbohydrates. Zoë's next assignment will be to autonomously sample soil over 50 kilometers of the Atacama. The Atacama desert is thought to be similar to Mars; instruments similar to those used on the 1970s Viking missions have previously failed to detect life there."

Contamination probably

[Eternally optimistic]

Most likely, the researchers who put the robot in the desert didn't wash their feet properly.

Answers!

[RobertTaylor]

The big question is will they find life on Earth?

Now we've found life on Earth...

[Anonymous Coward]

...we can start looking for intelligent beings.

Really?! Life on Earth?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe it.. must be a software error...

Wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're sending mars landers to a desert now?

Yeah, thats cheap... I guess NASA's budget has been cut again.

Re:Answers!

[Timesprout]

No, the big question is will they find intelligent life on Earth.

Autonomous robot takes pride in it's work...

[kaleco]

...demands pay rise and more more holidays.

article extract

[Anonymous Coward]

Autonomous Robot Finds Life in Atacama Desert

"The robot, named Zoe, escaped from a Palo Alto robotics research laboratory earlier this year. Scientists assumed it was lost until tourists photographed it in a remote part of the Atacama desert this week. In a statement to the police the robot said "I'm not going back to the lab. I've made friends out here, why would I leave?"

Re:Lichens?

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

This is Slashdot, where everyone has played NetHack at least once. We all know what lichens are.

homegrown

[Doc Ruby]

Good thing they didn't demo the device before Congress: there's certainly no intelligent life to detect there.

Re:Lichens?

[Timesprout]

Or how President Bush likes to refer to the citizens of Lichtenstein.

Of course they found life...

[tinrobot]

Because they went out on a Saturday night.

During the week, the Atacama desert is really dead.

Why do we need a rover for this?

[Red_Icculus]

We should send Google to search for life on Mars.

In related news

[Anonymous Coward]

"...The robot could also spray special dyes to detect life signatures like DNA, protein, lipids, and carbohydrates..."

In related news, Atacama tribe sues NASA for building spray-painting robot, spoiling natural habitat of ancient desert. NASA plans bigger robot equipped with boom box and head scarf to verify once and for all that life does not exist there. "Instead of trying to find life, we figured we just keep making our robots more and more annoying until some alien shows up with a ray gun."

Re:NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's true. NASA has completely revamped every single engineering process from the ground up so that now they are extremely capable and successful at lowering the bar and setting subterranean expectations so that pretty much no matter what happens it was a resounding success. Why didn't they think of that before?!?! Next up: NASA draws upon collective knowledge of the entire bag of hammers to repair/replace Hubble whilst Chinese successfully land a man on the moon using only firecrackers and drink umbrellas.

dyes?

[CaptainPinko]

"The robot could also spray special dyes to detect life signatures like DNA, protein, lipids, and carbohydrates."

Hopefully they are non-toxic. Otherwise "Good news: we found life. Bad news: we just killed it". Especially if you are looking for life in difficult landscapes you don't know how endangered something is.

Re:how dry is dry?

[hublan]

Guess he was not specific enough. The TFA's sidebar says:

"Some places in the Atacama Desert have not had rainfall for over 400 years!"

That's like... the Anti-Seattle.

Re:IANABiologist

[dakirw]

Very true. More advanced civilizations may have gone into stealth mode to avoid being detected by more aggressive/hostile civilizations. If so, our radio transmissions might be causing us a lot of problems in the future.

It would be ironic if our demise really was due to pop culture.

Re:Contamination probably

[Drooling Iguana]

Of course, the problem lies in finding a droid that understands the binary language of the moisture vaporators...

Face masks

[JThundley]

I thought the idea of a fog collector was cool, so I did a little more research into the indigenous people. They wear face masks while outside to protect themselves from the elements. Here's a picture [vegatransports.com.au].