What it is really like to check out Mars on Earth

(CNN) — Ethereal pictures from the Mars rover Perseverance have lit up the web at any time considering that NASA’s newest large-tech robot landed on the Red World on February 18.

The images, unveiled on NASA’s website, depict a desiccated landscape of lifeless orange-brown soil with rugged, rocky hills snaking throughout the horizon.

Though decidedly otherworldly, there’s also anything strikingly acquainted about them. Most likely that is simply because the pictures look a large amount like a position back in this article on Earth — a distant desert in Chile that NASA itself has focused time and income to checking out.

“You can argue no matter whether the Dry Valleys in Antarctica or the north-central part of the Atacama is the driest put on Earth, but some elements of the Atacama only get rainfall each individual 20 to even 100 many years,” suggests Brian Glass, principal investigator of the Atacama Rover Astrobiology Drilling Scientific tests (ARADS 2016-2019), which used the Atacama Desert to field0test equipment and procedures for foreseeable future missions to Mars.

Simply because the Atacama is these types of a lifeless and desolate put, NASA has occur to view it as the ideal analogue to Mars on Earth, testing rovers listed here often considering the fact that 1997. The most up-to-date have made use of prototype instruments to try out and detect everyday living, “mainly because if we can’t do it in a single of the deadest locations on Earth, we have no enterprise taking it to Mars,” clarifies Glass.

NASA's ARADS team works with its prototype Mars rover in Chile's Atacama Desert in 2018.

NASA’s ARADS workforce functions with its prototype Mars rover in Chile’s Atacama Desert in 2018.

NASA/CampoAlto/Victor Robles

The Atacama is a thin 1,000-mile strip of desert in the northern 50 % of Chile concerning the Pacific Ocean, to the west, and the Andes, to the east. Glass says that to fully grasp just how lifeless specified sections of it are, you can think of it in conditions of organic sign (i.e. lifetime) to history sound.

“The signal — even in the Mojave and distant components of the US mainland — is nevertheless really loud,” he says. “You even now see shrubs, cacti, microorganisms, scorpions, bugs there is continue to an ecosystem.”

On the opposite, in the hyperarid Atacama, “you could literally drop down, cut your arm on a rock and you would not stress about receiving an an infection due to the fact there are no community pathogens,” he explained.

What’s it like to stop by a put that NASA likens to Mars on Earth? Like Mars, the Atacama has an serious topography with huge salt flats and soaring volcanoes, which include the optimum lively a person on earth. It truly is also bought some of our planet’s darkest skies and biggest astronomy amenities.

With Chile vaccinating its populace faster than any place else in the Americas (including the United States), the otherworldly Atacama will probable be one of the initially areas in the location to welcome again intercontinental people. So, if individuals dramatic photographs from Perseverance have piqued new interest in Mars, the next finest matter may possibly only be an earthly flight absent.

NASA has come to view parts of the desolate Atacama Desert as the perfect analogue to Mars on Earth.

NASA has occur to watch components of the desolate Atacama Desert as the great analogue to Mars on Earth.

Mark Johanson

The driest location on earth?

When researchers contact the Atacama the driest non-polar place on earth, it is areas like Yungay that they are conversing about. This distant backland, about 55 miles from the city of Antofagasta, is where NASA conducts a great deal of its analysis.

“Yungay is in a lengthy valley with windy eroded hills to either aspect,” Glass claims. “It is incredibly brown and really barren there is no indicators of nearly anything alive.”

There is, ironically, a 36-foot-tall sculpture of a hand clawing its way out of the desert nearby. Regarded as Mano del Desierto, it was put near to Yungay in 1992 by Chilean artist Mario Irarrázabal — extensive in advance of any chat of this place as a spot where by NASA would one particular day search for indications of lifestyle hidden beneath the surface.

However Yungay was extensive considered of as the driest put in the Atacama, the latest analysis suggests that title could in fact belong to Maria Elena South, which lies close to a nitrate mining city about 170 miles even more north.

Neither place has any facilities or vacationer sights, but they are vital places for appreciating the emptiness of the Atacama and its parallels to Mars — especially considering that the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica (which lots of researchers believe that are even drier) are extremely challenging to reach.

El Tatio is kind of a mini-Yellowstone with 80 gurgling geysers.

El Tatio is type of a mini-Yellowstone with 80 gurgling geysers.

Shutterstock

Volcanoes and geysers

Mars is property to the tallest volcano in our photo voltaic procedure, Olympus Mons, though the Atacama residences the optimum energetic volcano on earth, Ojos del Salado.

This muscular gray-brown mountain rises 22,615 toes higher than sea degree and is the next maximum peak in the Western Hemisphere just after Aconcagua in Argentina.

However, the superlatives don’t prevent there its permanent crater lake is believed to be the highest body of h2o everywhere in the entire world.

“The seem of this outstanding volcano in an location surrounded by other superior volcanoes all above 6,000 meters (almost 20,000 feet) would make you come to feel like you are pretty modest,” says Ercio Mettifogo, who runs the neighborhood journey tour operator Puna de Atacama.

Ojos del Salado is not a very complex climb, however the extraordinary altitude, punishing winds (up to 74 mph) and sub-zero temperatures (down below -20 levels Fahrenheit) certainly make it a problem. Most summit among November and April on expeditions of between 8 times for industry experts and 12 days for hobby mountaineers.

The Atacama Altiplano is normally likened to the Tibetan Plateau, and the location around Ojos del Salado is house to some 17 mountains higher than 6,000 meters, Mettifogo suggests, creating it a hub for adventure journey.

Even further north, in the vicinity of the vacationer town of San Pedro de Atacama, lies still yet another geothermal surprise of the Atacama: El Tatio, a mini-Yellowstone with 80 gurgling geysers and even far more gassy fumaroles.

Backed by a panorama of snow-capped volcanoes, El Tatio is the most significant geyser area in the Southern Hemisphere and the highest on Earth at 14,170 ft previously mentioned sea degree.

Nevado Tres Cruces National Park is home to flamingos.

Nevado Tres Cruces Nationwide Park is house to flamingos.

Mark Johanson

Salt flats and flamingos

Substantially of the Atacama could be as dead as Mars, but the desert bursts with color close to its amazing salt flats, known as salares, whose briny waters help a wide array of daily life, such as flamingos.

There’s the exceptional Andean flamingo, which has yellow legs and black-tipped wings, and the a little more compact James’s flamingo, which has brick-red legs and a dazzling yellow beak. You will find also the pinkest flamingo of them all: the Chilean flamingo, which, irrespective of its name, is the most common throughout South America, observed from Argentina up to Ecuador.

These fluffy pink birds are most easily spotted in substantial Andean parks like Los Flamencos Countrywide Reserve, close to San Pedro, and Nevado Tres Cruces Countrywide Park, near the city of Copiapó.

“The salt flats are also famed for their multicolored lagoons,” states Gabriel Rojas of Turismo Atacamensis, who can take readers up to swim in the ethereal turquoise lagoon of the Salar de Pedernales, just north of Nevado Tres Cruces Nationwide Park. Pedernales also has blood pink, navy blue and emerald eco-friendly swimming pools, all joined on a 2-mile mountaineering path Rojas constructed with his brother.

Some scientists feel that, if we are to come across indications of lifestyle on Mars, it will be in its historic salt ponds, which shaped in destinations like the Gale Crater and are claimed to be remarkably very similar to people uncovered on the Altiplano of South The united states.

The ethereal turquoise lagoon of the Salar de Pedernales is just north of Nevado Tres Cruces National Park.

The ethereal turquoise lagoon of the Salar de Pedernales is just north of Nevado Tres Cruces Countrywide Park.

Mark Johanson

The clearest skies in the world

The Atacama Desert is not only a NASA take a look at web page for upcoming missions to Mars it is really also the very position from which some of the most innovative planetary observations are built here on Earth.

Northern Chile is home to some 70% of the global infrastructure for ground-dependent astronomy. The major jobs of the 2020s — which includes the Large Magellan Telescope and the Incredibly Massive Telescope — will all increase atop barren hills here in the coming many years.

“When night will come, the silence and darkness manufactured by the absence of significant towns — and their sound and mild pollution — becomes like a stairway to heaven that tends to make you experience just about like you can touch the cosmos with your fingers,” suggests Cristóbal Vergara, founder of Turismo Tembeta, which runs stargazing tours from the town of La Serena.

The Elqui Valley, on the southern edge of the Atacama Desert, has become a key hub not only for scientists, but also beginner stargazers.

“The coastal mountain range retains most of the mist coming in from the Pacific, making it possible for for minimal cloud address and in close proximity to frequent apparent skies in this article,” Vergara says of the disorders, noting that you can just lay back on the quartz-stuffed soil with a blanket after the sun sets.

For one thing extra skilled, there are nearly a dozen observatories near the tourist hub of Vicuña open to daily astro-travelers hoping for a close-up see of the Jackson Pollock sky. Many of the exploration-dependent amenities — which include Gemini South, Cerro Tololo, La Silla and Las Campanas — open up up on weekends for guided visits, too.

The Elqui Valley was named the world’s very first Worldwide Dark Sky Sanctuary in 2015. That designation led to a boom in lodgings with see-by roofs so you can comfortably sleep under a meadow of stars.

Vergara says the very best section of stargazing below is that you’re “in the really spot the place grand explorations, advances in know-how and new astronomic discoveries that might aid the future of humanity are occurring just about every day.”

The Atacama could possibly not be as cold or harsh or alien as Mars, but it is really the closest we’ve got to the Red Earth on Earth. To take a look at is to experience the head-bending sensation of what it could possibly be like to vacation out of this globe.

Mark Johanson is a freelance journalist centered in Santiago, Chile. His composing has appeared in Lonely World, Men’s Journal, GQ, Newsweek and The Guardian, between other individuals. You can observe him on all social channels @MarkontheMap.