Follow the Sun |Robotic field investigation will bring new
scientific understanding of the Atacama as a habitat for life
with distinct analogies to Mars. Credit: Carnegie Mellon
University The two NASA rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which
are speeding their way towards a January rendezvous with Mars,
are arguably the most advanced robotic spacecraft ever sent to
explore another heavenly body. But to the robotics researchers
working on the Life in the Atacama project, Spirit and
Opportunity are already history. This group of hardware and
software wizards, based at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics
Institute are designing rovers that, they hope, will roam the
Martian surface, not in this decade, but in the next. Their
goal: autonomous robots with sufficient onboard intelligence to
explore for days at a time without human intervention. The
development of these new robotic capabilities is being field-
tested in Chile's Atacama desert, which stretches east from the
Pacific coast high into the Andes mountains.