“Chile’s Atacama Desert often serves as a testbed for robotic rovers bound for Mars, since it closely mimics the Martian environment. While at the site, trial rovers recently posted some exciting results—they were able to recover subsurface samples, which could greatly aid missions looking for signs of life on Mars.
“We have shown that a robotic rover can recover subsurface soil in the most Mars-like desert on Earth,” says Stephen Pointing, a professor at Yale-NUS College, Singapore, who led the microbial research. “This is important because most scientists agree that any life on Mars would have to occur below…”
Source: https://www.ecnmag.com/news/2019/03/rovers-ready-search-martian-life-burrowed-deep-underground
