CHAPTER ONE

Wild Ride to Base Camp

FRANCISCO CALDERON, THE CHILEAN STUDENT AND translater whom everyone calls “Finch,” is waiting for us at the entrance to the tiny airport in Iquique. Of my traveling companions, Alan Waggoner and Paul Tompkins are veterans of previous Atacama expeditions, while Dom Jonak and I are viewing this eerie landscape for the first time. Jonak and Tompkins are from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh while Waggoner directs the Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center (MBIC) at Carnegie Mellon.

The Atacama Desert stretches from the Peruvian border south in a narrow band 600 miles into northern Chile. With its dazzling white salt flats and vast expanses of rusty-red emptiness, the Atacama is the driest place on Earth, a place climatologists call absolute desert. Death Valley in California and the Gobi Desert in Mongolia get anywhere from three to six times more moisture annually than the Atacama. Obviously, there are very few living organisms in this desert, which makes the Atacama an ideal analog to Mars. Seeking life on Mars is an ongoing obsession of many of the scientists and software engineers at Carnegie Mellon and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a frequent partner.

We pile our bags into the bed of the double cab Toyota HiLux pickup, a sturdier version of the Toyota Tacoma we use in the United States. The HiLux, an Action Utility Vehicle (AUV) according to Toyota, is aptly named because of its capacity to endure constant, violent, and aggressive abuse. They are perfect for the terrain and also for the crazed, explosive spirit with which the roboticists drive when unleashed in the wilds with a vehicle built for battering. The programmers’ frustration of sitting behind a computer and writing and struggling endlessly with code is released in this desert—with passion. Soon, we are rocketing out onto this sun-scorched plain.

The road from the airport into the desert is smooth, and the terrain is flat and red, with white misshapen clumps of salt dotting the landscape to the west where we are headed. They look like gigantic white fat globules, glittering, almost oozing, in the sun. We can see the distant bejeweled reflection of the ocean off to one side, a rather disconcerting sight, considering the barrenness of the landscape surrounding us. Although it does not form rain, the moisture contained in the thick dense fog from the ocean seeping above the mountains allows some organisms to survive. We will be seeking those organisms at Salar Grande, the location of our base camp, less than an hour away. Iquique—the name comes from the Aymara (a native Andean ethnic group) word that translates to “laziness”—is a tourist stop popular for its surf and beaches and its architecture. There’s also a bustling commercial port area to service the copper and salt unearthed from mines in the desert.

The road we’re on ends after a high-speed half-hour of full-throttle straightaway driving. Finch—so called because he resembles the character of the same name in the movie American Pie—skids to a stop in front of the security gate of the salt mine, the Compania Minera Punta de Lobos, the biggest open cast mine of common salt in the world. Swarthy, curly haired, and slender, Finch jumps out of the truck, places a flashing yellow light on top of the cab, and releases a high-flying antenna, which has been secured against the cab, with a red flag at its tip. This is to make us as visible as possible to avoid dangerous collisions with the gigantic tractor-trailer salt trucks, which commute from the mine to the port where the salt ships are loaded for transport, to spots around the world for refining.

At this point, leaving the mine and the ocean behind us, the smooth road peters out and in its place is a rutted washboard rock-and-dirt right-of-way that has not been maintained for many years, if ever. There’s a single deep set of tire tracks seared into the landscape and extending into a red, dust-swirling infinity. “Hang on,” Finch says in his heavily accented English, turning to look at us, and smiling. “To minimize brain damage, I have to drive like a bat out of hell. We will soar over the bumps.”

This then is our brief introduction to the most harrowing and frenzied aspect of desert life during field operations, called OPS: Driving with a roboticist. The HiLux has a roll bar, I am happy to note.

A few weeks later, one of these trucks, rocketing down this road at breakneck speed while racing with another in the pitch dark dead of night, would flip over, sumersaulting its occupants, breaking windows and collapsing metal. Luckily, the young roboticists in the cab will survive without too many scratches.

Today, ten minutes of wild, bumping, swerving, backbreaking, jaw-crunching, roller-coastering later, with our backs aching and our knees bruised, we are all about to puke our guts out, when, at an invisible marker, Finch suddenly takes a wild turn right, skids on the salt-laden sand like a downhill skier, and streaks up a steep hillside in an explosion of red dust. The base camp is on top of the hill.

Zoë is on the periphery as we pull in. It is wide and low to the ground, sitting on thick mountain bike tires. A flat row of shiny solar panels energizes a row of batteries below the panels. Three high-resolution digital cameras gawk into the bright sun atop a scrawny cranelike neck. It reminds me of an ice cream cart at a carnival—or a self-propelled flatbed railroad car. Zoë’s watching as we stumble out of the truck. Or at least Zoë seems to be watching. We don’t know at the time that Zoë can’t see. Or, to put it more precisely, Zoë can see, technically; but what Zoë sees isn’t exactly what is there—a fact that makes the prospects for a successful OPS very tenuous.