The Atacama Rover Astrobiology Drilling Studies (ARADS) project recently completed a second field season in the Atacama Desert (Chile) testing a mobile robot equipped with a 1 meter drill and three life detection instruments. The goal of ARADS is to develop a new concept for a future rover mission to search for evidence of life on Mars. Such a mission would be radically different from both past and current Mars missions. This talk will introduce ARADS, roving life-detection, and results from testing in Chile.

Dr. Brian Glass leads the Deployable Automation Technologies (DAT) group at NASA Ames. Since joining Ames in 1987, Brian has been involved with (and led) many projects in adaptive controls, automated drilling, air traffic optimization, robotics, instrument automation, and vehicle and complex system health monitoring. Brian is the principal investigator for both the Life-Detection Mars-analog Project (LMAP) and the ARADS project, and has been called “NASA’s drilling guy” on occasion. Brian received his S.B. from MIT, his M.S. from Stanford, and his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech.

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