With its dry climate and high elevation, the Atacama Desert plateau in Chile is one of the best locations on Earth for stargazing. A major hub for astronomical research, the region will soon to be home to the largest ground telescope ever built—a facility so sensitive that it may be able to detect signs of life in the atmospheres of alien worlds.
But it’s not just the skies above the Atacama Desert that stand to revolutionize our search for extraterrestrial life. It’s also the ground below. Often called the driest place in the world and the subject of punishing ultraviolet radiation, the Atacama Desert is about the closest environment to Mars that you can get, short of schlepping over to the Red Planet.
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