Digging for bedrock

The SAFER field trial in Chile's Atacama Desert used ESA’s ExoMars rover as its ‘reference mission’, which will include a drill to probe beneath the surface of Mars. SAFER’s test rover was not equipped with a real drill, however. In order to acquire ‘ground truth’ the field team had to dig a hole in the white area of the ‘SAFER Valley’ test site nicknamed the ‘pond’ and then a trench in the radar raster scan location. At the simulated drill location in the raster scan, the field team found a layer of rock starting at a depth of 60 cm. This comes close to the kind of features the team was looking for: analogues for locations on Mars that could hold traces of past or present life.