LSU and NASA have discovered an Earth environment that appears out of this world.
LSU researcher Fred Rainey and a team of scientists from NASA and the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico have discovered a surface in a South American desert that closely resembles the surface found on Mars.
The Atacama Desert in Chile has been deemed a “Mars-like surface” because of its inability to preserve life.
“There are no plants that are going to grow out there,” Rainey, a biological sciences associate professor, said. “If you took a bucket of water out there and dumped it on the plant every day, then it may be okay, but if you just stuck a plant out there, then it would be dead within days, if not hours.”
Rainey said Atacama is among the driest places on the Earth’s surface.
Since 1999, approximately only two to four millimeters of rain have fallen on the 600-mile Atacama desert.
Rainey said the precipitation that could enter the Atacama Desert is shielded by two rain-shadows. On the east, the Andes Mountains block water from entering the desert, while on the west side of the desert, a coastal range of mountains act as the second rain-shadow.
“So you sort of have a double rain-shadow, and so no moisture gets into the area in between, which is the desert,” Rainey said
In the 1970s NASA launched a series of missions, called Viking, to develop a better awareness of Mars’ atmosphere.
Chris McKay, a NASA researcher, said the information obtained from the Viking missions is surprisingly similar to the information found in Chile.
“In the driest part of the Atacama, we found that, if Viking had landed there instead of on Mars and done exactly the same experiments, we would also have been shut out,” McKay said in a University press release. “The Atacama appears to be the only place on Earth Viking would have found nothing.”
Danielle Bagaley, a biological sciences research associate and Atacama researcher, said the desert will serve as a preparation tool for future space expeditions.
“This will allow NASA to do research on Earth that could answer certain questions about Mars that would otherwise require them to travel to Mars to obtain these answers,” Bagaley said. “Also, this desert may aid in testing of instruments designed for future Mars-bound missions.”
Rainey said because the inhospitable environment of the Atacama desert would never yield life above the surface, he and the other researchers will now begin to look underground for signs of life.
“If there is life on Mars at all, then our greatest hope is finding it below the surface and not on the surface,” Rainey said.