page_title: Atacama Desert
section_title: Comparison to Mars
hierarchical_section_title: Atacama Desert / Climate / Comparison to Mars
caption_attribution_description: English: Many ESO Pictures of the Week feature distant cosmic objects — mysterious jumbles of stars, gas, dust and more sitting millions of light-years away. This panorama, however, showcases a somewhat more tangible, but no less glorious, beauty — that of our home planet, Earth. Captured as the Sun slips below a false horizon of cloud, the sky glows in such a vivid shade of orange that the desert landscape takes on an almost alien appearance. In fact, the Chilean Atacama desert has been used previously by film crews seeking a Mars-like landscape! This other-worldly look is due to the exceptionally arid climate and the site’s complete isolation. The lack of humidity, rain and light pollution together produce both a dusty, rocky landscape and some of the most spectacularly clear skies found anywhere on Earth. This image was taken by ESO’s Simon Lowery in 2016 from Cerro Armazones, the future home of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). The Paranal site, home to the Very Large Telescope (VLT), is just visible beyond the hilltops running across the centre of the frame. The constituent telescopes of the VLT can here be seen alongside the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) on the leftmost hill, whilst the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) sits on an adjacent peak.
context_page_description: The Atacama Desert is a desert plateau in South America covering a 1,600 km strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes Mountains. The remote interior of the Atacama Desert is essentially tied for the driest desert in the world with the other equally driest region being some very specific spots within the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica. It is also the only true desert to receive less precipitation than the polar deserts. Both regions have been used as experimentation sites on Earth for Mars expedition simulations. According to estimates, the Atacama Desert occupies 105,000 km², or 128,000 km² if the barren lower slopes of the Andes are included. Most of the desert is composed of stony terrain, salt lakes, sand, and felsic lava that flows towards the Andes.
  The desert owes its extreme aridity to a constant temperature inversion due to the cool north-flowing Humboldt ocean current and to the presence of the strong Pacific anticyclone. The most arid region of the Atacama Desert is situated between two mountain chains of sufficient height to prevent moisture advection from either the Pacific or the Atlantic Ocean, a two-sided rain shadow.
context_section_description: In a region about 100 km (60 mi) south of Antofagasta, which averages 3,000 m (10,000 ft) in elevation, the soil has been compared to that of Mars. Owing to its otherworldly appearance, the Atacama has been used as a location for filming Mars scenes, most notably in the television series Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets.
  In 2003, a team of researchers published a report  in which they duplicated the tests used by the Viking 1 and Viking 2 Mars landers to detect life, and were unable to detect any signs in Atacama Desert soil in the region of Yungay. The region may be unique on Earth in this regard, and is being used by NASA to test instruments for future Mars missions. The team duplicated the Viking tests in Mars-like Earth environments and found that they missed present signs of life in soil samples from Antarctic dry valleys, the Atacama Desert of Chile and Peru, and other locales.
  However, in 2014, a new hyperarid site was reported, María Elena South, which was much drier than Yungay, and thus, a better Mars-like environment.
  In 2008, the Phoenix Mars Lander detected perchlorates on the surface of Mars at the same site where water was first discovered. Perchlorates are also found in the Atacama and associated nitrate deposits have contained organics, leading to speculation that signs of life on Mars are not incompatible with perchlorates. The Atacama is also a testing site for the NASA-funded Earth–Mars Cave Detection Program.
caption: The lack of humidity, rain, and light pollution together produce a dusty, rocky landscape.[29]
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "Many ESO Pictures of the Week feature distant cosmic objects \u2014 mysterious jumbles of stars, gas, dust and more sitting millions of light-years away. This panorama, however, showcases a somewhat more tangible, but no less glorious, beauty \u2014 that of our home planet, Earth.  Captured as the Sun slips below a false horizon of cloud, the sky glows in such a vivid shade of orange that the desert landscape takes on an almost alien appearance. In fact, the Chilean Atacama desert has been used previously by film crews seeking a Mars-like landscape! This other-worldly look is due to the exceptionally arid climate and the site\u2019s complete isolation. The lack of humidity, rain and light pollution together produce both a dusty, rocky landscape and some of the most spectacularly clear skies found anywhere on Earth. This image was taken by ESO\u2019s Simon Lowery in 2016 from Cerro Armazones, the future home of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). The Paranal site, home to the Very Large Telescope (VLT), is just visible beyond the hilltops running across the centre of the frame. The constituent telescopes of the VLT can here be seen alongside the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) on the leftmost hill, whilst the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) sits on an adjacent peak."}