A stepping stone to the Universe

The Atacama Desert of Chile is one of the driest places on Earth, with extremely reliable weather, making it an excellent site to explore the Universe. So it’s not strange that this is the place ESO has chosen to place the flagship facilities for European ground-based astronomy.

At 2635 meters above sea level in the Atacama Desert, we find ESO’s Paranal Observatory, seen on the far mountain top in this image. It hosts several world-class telescopes like the Very Large Telescope (VLT), and the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), the latter located on its own peak, seen here to the right of the main one.

But the desert is good for other astronomy related sciences as well: Mars explorations! The red and rocky environment around Paranal has a strong resemblance to Mars, making it a perfect site for the European Space Agency (ESA) to test their Mars rovers.