In the March 2006 issue of IEEE Spectrum, staff editor Jean Kumagai reports on what she saw and heard while observing the field team last fall. The researchers come to the Atacama because, more than any other on Earth, it approximates the barren, arid rockiness of Mars. Their robot, dubbed Zoe, is far more sophisticated than the current crop of rovers. For one thing, it can run autonomously, without having a human driver constantly feeding it instructions.