NASA develops autonomous forest in search of life on Mars

One of the challenges of the Mars Inquiry is how to penetrate the surface of the planet. Current projects, such as the Insight Lander, are equipped with a drill to place probes in the Martian rock, but earlier this year the Insight drill was stuck in the ground and trying to move the LG takes seriously into consideration. Future projects, such as the March 2020 LG, will be equipped with a rotating set of drill bits to crush Martian rock and extract samples.

NASA is now trying a new approach: an autonomous drill that can go several feet deep and can adapt to different environments. The project, called Atrada Astrobiology Drilling Studies (ARADS), is currently being tested in the Atacama Desert, Chile, the closest environment to Earth.

"ARADS is essentially about preparing NASA to look for life on Mars," said Brian Glass, senior research scientist at ARADS at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, in a statement. "Developing the scientific instruments and robotics we will need is an important part of that. It is therefore important to determine how we are actually going run the mission. The best way to practice this is to go do it here on Earth. "

The advantage of the ARADS system over existing drills is that it can operate without human intervention in real time, by recording data on the ground or rock on which it is moving and adjusting its plot and the resistance of the drilling accordingly. This allows scientists to focus on the data collected through exercise rather than worry about getting the exercise. "One of the benefits of this exercise is that it can take you from dirt to data all by yourself," said Thomas Stucky, the sample processing software for ARADS, in the same statement. "All the scientists have to do is direct the rover to the place where he needs to dig, to tell the drill how deep, and the exercise will determine the rest."

As exercise can go deeper than previous exercises, he may be able to discover important resources such as groundwater or even help in the search for a life potential on the planet. "If there is life on the basement of Mars, it's probably in the form of microbes that struggle to live with minute amounts of water in the soil or layers of salt, "said Arwen Davé, Systems Engineer at ARADS. "Depending on what the drill can tell us on the ground, we can detect where these layers are, maybe even where life is."

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