ESA Begins Mars Rover Tests In Chile 45
Zothecula writes "The Atacama desert in Chile is so dry that parts of it are utterly devoid of life down to bacteria. That and its sandy, rock-strewn terrain makes it so similar to Mars that it's a perfect spot for ESA to trial its Sample Acquisition Field Experiment with a Rover (SAFER), which this week is carrying out tests related to navigation, remote control and the use of scientific instruments. The agency's goal is the latest in a series of tests to develop technologies and gain practical experience in anticipation of ESA's launch of the ExoMars rover to the Red Planet in 2018."
Spotted (Score:1)
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Soon we will discover if there is indeed water on Chile
Re:Spotted (Score:4, Informative)
Why not just do it indoors? (Score:3)
The Atacama is pretty inhospitable, especially for people trying to run these tests. They could recreate the conditions in a large indoor lab easily enough. All you need is rocks, sand, fans, and some dehumidifiers. I don't really get why they need to go to the Atacama.
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The rovers are painfully slow. They don't need 600 square miles to test them unless the tests last fifty years.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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the terrain of indoor simulation would be small in extents and totally predictable. the 600 square miles of the Atacama doesn't have either problem
To your point, we need the unpredictable variables. An indoor experiment would have too much control. In fact they have probably already done that.
For example: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! [youtube.com]
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Are you saying that the Spanish Inquisition is hiding in the Atacama?
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I wonder what the price tag is to fill a large indoor space with enough sand for a good test. Don't forget we also need to pay for damage to the building from blowing sand everywhere and heating it up to uncomfortable temperatures. Then there's the price to clean it all back out for the next project.
Compare that to some airfare, shipping, and sunscreen.
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They'll be testing mars rovers for decades. Something the size of a football field (a standard unit of measurement in the States) would be fine and the cost wouldn't be prohibitive.
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Re:Why not just do it indoors? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fill a building in California with sand and it's rapidly going to be full of microorganisms, even if you bake the dirt first. They fed dirt from the Atacama to the Viking lander that was kept on Earth, and it didn't find life.
Fill a building with rocks and sand and it's all fluffy and aerated. Ground textures are nothing like real-world terrain. Hills can only be a few meters tall and steep slopes are very difficult to build without additives.
That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are more reasons.
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The main reason is that the team members like Chilean food. And it's hard to test the rover's Alpaca spit shield in an indoor test facility.
Re: those spitty alpacas (Score:2)
Those Martian alpacas are mean buggers, aren't they? They'd just as soon spit on you as give your rover the time of day.
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"The Atacama is pretty inhospitable"
No it isn't. Atacama desert has considerable amount of wild life, mine workers and tourists. I've been there as a back packer, and you can live there for a few weeks without problems in a shoestring budget.
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Depends on where in the Atacama you are. Some places don't even have microorganisms, where it hasn't really rained since the end of the ice age.
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Pfft (Score:2, Funny)
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Kerbal Space Program has taught me one thing well: Big rovers are ridiculously hard to put anywhere other than "just left of the launchpad".
Advice for other KSP players: A 650-ton rover is not a good idea. Funny, perhaps, but not good.
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It's not the size, but what you do with it. If they prove life on Mars, then ours will feel really puny.
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It appears the Soviets already did that.
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Or perhaps the US also:
http://news.discovery.com/space/we-may-have-already-colonized-mars-120831.htm [discovery.com]
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Well, from reading the comments here, I've determined that it has a drill (which has to be operated manually.)
knock-off (Score:2)
if you looked at it, you are thinking the same thing i am: this [esa.int] rover [esa.int] is a knock-off of our previous [proftec.com] rover model. [ddmcdn.com]
also, ours is bigger [usatoday.net] than yours. [wordpress.com]
Antarctica as well (Score:2)
I sell these for $500 (Score:1)
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I don't even want to know what kind of roaming charges you'd be racking up on Mars.