Introduction: One crucial discovery by the 2009 NASA Phoenix Lander was the detection of perchlorate at ~1% in the surface Martian regolith [1]. High concentrations of perchlorate may oxidize organics on Mars and be problematic during extraction of organics during future in situ investigations. High temperature pyrolytic extraction methods will likely result in catalytic degradation of organics...

JUAN FRANCISCO ARAYA 2,3 & JUAN ANTONIO ALIAGA 1Universidad de Atacama, Copayapu 485, Copiapó, Region of Atacama, Chile and Programa de Doctorado en Sistemática y Biodiversidad, Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile orcid.org/0000-0002-4087-9641 urn:lsid:zoobank.org:author:443B4F42-FB13-42A6-B92B-1B0F835698A9 2Laboratorio de Química Inorgánica y Electroquímica, Departamento de Química, F...

Recent years have seen renewed attention to planetary exploration, and robotics is recognized as essential to many upcoming missions. In this article we describe the ongoing efforts of the Nomad Project to develop robots for planetary and terrestrial exploration. The project is developing, demonstrating, and evaluating systems capable of long-distance, long-duration missions. In 1997 this work ...

APECS is the distributed control system of the new Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) telescope located on the Llano de Chajnantor at an altitude of 5107 m in the Atacama desert in northern Chile. APECS is based on Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) software and employs a modern, object-oriented design using the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) as the middleware. New gener...

The Taltal area, which lies within the coastal cordillera of northern Chile, is dominated by a group of major active faults that cut a eugeosynclinal section of predominantly Jurassic andesites overlying Paleozoic metamorphic and plutonlc rocks and intruded by Late Mesozoic plutons. The Atacama fault, a suggested regional strike-sllp fracture parallel to the coastline, has been obliquely cut an...

The Atacama Desert in Chile is the driest and oldest desert on Earth, also considered one of the best Mars analog models. Here, several heterotrophic microbial communities have been discovered in its driest regions, with the ones present in the soil subsurface being one of the most interesting due to its existence in a habitat with almost no water available and almost undetectable organic carbo...

about 30 viewers, a driver is selected to direct the robot's path and the pan and tilt of the panospheric imagery. Other audience members choose what technical information is overlaid on the display. In addition, imagery and robot status are available in real time on the Internet. The Science Center also features kiosks that describe the Trek, various technologies utilized by the robot, the sci...

Isotopic analysis of nitrate and sulfate minerals from the nitrate ore fields of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile has shown anomalous O enrichments in both minerals. O values of 14–21 ‰ in nitrate and 0.4 to 4 ‰ in sulfate are the most positive found in terrestrial minerals to date. Modeling of atmospheric processes indicates that the O signatures are the result of photochemical reactions i...

[1] Isotopic studies indicate that natural perchlorate is produced on Earth in arid environments by the oxidation of chlorine species through pathways involving ozone or its photochemical products. With this analogy, we propose that the arid environment on Mars may have given rise to perchlorate through the action of atmospheric oxidants. A variety of hypothetical pathways can be proposed inclu...

Nomad is a mobile robot designed for extended planetary exploration. In June and July of 1997, Nomad performed the first such mission, traversing more than 220 kilometers in the Atacama Desert of Chile and exploring a landscape analogous to that of the Moon and Mars. Nomad's journey, the Atacama Desert Trek, was an unprecedented demonstration of long-distance, long-duration robotic operation. G...