If you’re a living organism, the Atacama Desert is a pretty awful place to be.
It is the second driest desert in the world, with the land composed of rocks, dust, salt lakes, and lava that flows over arid surfaces towards the Andes.
If anyone was to be shown a photo of it alongside a photo of the surface of Mars, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
While some were entirely new, many of the organisms were still extremely strange and difficult to identify.
“In almost half of the cases, the databases could not clearly say what we had in our hands,” lead researcher Armando Azua-Bustos said to the Washington Post.
The specific site looked at in this study, aptly named Red Stone, consists of very similar geological materials to Mars, which could make it analogous to the Red Planet.
The instruments used in the study were the same as those that are already on (or will be on) landers that will search Mars for extraterrestrial life.
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