Robot Sent To Chile's Atacama Desert To Attempt To Seek LifePartial Quote:Pittsburgh PA (SPX) Aug 12, 2004
Carnegie Mellon University robotics and life sciences researchers will demonstrate Zoe, an autonomous rover being groomed to seek and identify life in hostile environments, at 10 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 12, at the former LTV site off Brownfield Road in Pittsburgh.
The researchers, who are part of a team that includes scientists from NASA's Ames Research Center (Mountain View, Calif.), the University of Tennessee and Universidad Catolica del Norte (Antofagasta, Chile), will soon be accompanying Zoe to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where it will perform experiments focused on seeking and identifying forms of life.
The team will spend nearly two months in the Atacama, described as the most arid region on earth, working on the second phase of a three-year program whose results may ultimately enable robots to look for life on Mars.
The project is part of NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology Program for Exploring Planets, or ASTEP, which concentrates on pushing the limits of technology in harsh environments.
It should be interesting to see how well a robot detects life in an earthly desert. If it fails to find it then the results of Mars probles failing to find life are more open to questioning.
Topic: Robot Sent To Chile's Atacama Desert To Attempt To Seek Life (Read 1055 times)