CMU's Zoë Rover Shows Robots Can Find Subterranean Organisms - News - Carnegie Mellon University

An autonomous rover named Zoë, designed and built by Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, drilled into the soil of Chile's Atacama Desert in 2013 and discovered unusual, highly specialized microbes. The NASA-funded mission demonstrated how robots might someday find life on Mars. The astrobiology mission was led by the Robotics Institute and the SETI Institute to test technologies for searching for life underground. The microbial analyses of the soil samples recovered by Zoë were published Feb. 28 in the journal Frontiers of Microbiology. Zoë was equipped with a one-meter drill that recovered samples several times each day.