Is This the Machine That Will Finally Find Life On Mars?

Dohm´s accuracy has been good-to-excellent these past three weeks, but ever since Zo got to its final site at the beginning of October, he hasn´t felt his usual assertive self. On October 7, around the same time that Jonak and his colleagues in the Atacama realized that the two teams were out of sync, an observer from the University of Iowa based in the Pittsburgh office picks up the startling nine-mile discrepancy. Soon e-mails are shooting back and forth between Pittsburgh and the desert. As the engineers cackle in their chilly communications shack, Wettergreen and Cabrol come to a mutual understanding: For the past four days they´ve been traveling in separate realities.
Cabrol doesn´t rise from her chair. "You´re in the wrong valley," she tells her team calmly, eliciting gasps and nervous laughs, then a collective wave of relief. "It was like being in this other world that´s so similar, so reasonable that you can´t get out of it," Warren-Rhodes says later. "But you´ve always got this nagging in your head, â€Something isn´t right.´ "

After the fact, the Iowa observer, Geb Thomas, notes that the landing-site circle was near the edge of the map and the Pittsburgh scientists never requested the adjoining map. "They were trying to solve the puzzle with the pieces in front of them, and nobody thought to get the other puzzle off the shelf."

Proof of Concept

This was the last year of a $4-million, three-year grant from NASA for the Zo project. If NASA is satisfied with the results, Wettergreen and Cabrol hope that the agency will look favorably on a new grant proposal for further development and testing. They could be back in the desert by 2007.

As for the days Zo spent running around lost in the Chilean desert, it´s a useful lesson but not a major cause for concern: On a real Mars mission, NASA experts would have additional tools at their disposal for tracking the ´bot, including more-sophisticated radio data and descent imagery.

There are plenty of technical issues still to be resolved, however. Zo´s still-raw life-detection technology doesn´t catch every sign of life. Moreover, the sprinkler system, which does such a fine job of revivifying the Atacama, would be hopeless on Mars, where atmospheric pressure is so low that water exists only as ice or vapor. Zo, as presently constituted, would freeze its nozzles off.