The Atacama Desert of northern Chile is one of the driest places on Earth and a robust Mars analog environment. Its soils, salars, and hypersaline brines provide rare opportunities to study biosignature preservation under extreme aridity and high radiation. As part of my PhD research, I investigated the geomicrobiology and biosignature preservation of Atacama sediments. These efforts inform future life-detection missions to Mars, where the preservation of microbial traces in hyperarid landscapes is a central question.