Atacama desert life raises hope of life on Planet Mars

South Americas Desert Atacama receives rainfall once in a decade or less, but tiny bacteria and micro organisms survive there, hinting at the possibility of similar life on Mars said the researchers on Monday.

The desert, which spans parts of chile and Peru, is the driest non polar desert on Earth and may contain the environment most like that of Red planet, said the report in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 2015 a Lead researcher Dirk Schulze Makuch, a professor and planetary scientist at the Technical University of Berlin, and colleagues took a trip to the desert to learn more about what kind of life might exist there. 

Then unexpectedly it rained. Scientists detected an explosion of biological activity in the soil, and scooped up samples. Genomic analyses helped identify the several apparently indigenous species of microbial life mostly bacteria that have somehow adapted to live in the harsh environment by living dormant for years, then re animating and reproducing once it rained.

In the past researchers have found dying organisms near the surface and remnants of DNA, but thus is really the first time that any one has been able to identify a persistent form of life living in the soil of the Atacama Desert. 

Researcher Schulze Makuch said we believe these microbial communities can lay dormant for thousands of years in conditions very similar to what you would find on a planet like Mars and come back to life when it rains.

Humans could be exploring Mars within the next 20 years thanks to commercial space flight entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, British astronaut Tim Peake said he added that government space agencies had estimated humans would land on mars in the late 2030s but that commercials space flight could bring that date forward.