Mankind's obsessive fascination about finding Earth-like planets and exploring extraterrestrial life seem to finally be bearing fruits. NASA scientists are expecting to find the first traces of alien life within the next 20 years.
In a panel discussion held at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., experts outlined NASA's road map to the search for life in the universe, an ongoing journey that involves a number of current and future telescopes, Indo-Asian News Service reported. "Sometime in the near future, people will be able to point to a star and say: That star has a planet like earth," said Sara Seager, a professor of planetary science and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
NASA's quest to study planetary systems around other stars will continue with the launch of the Transiting Exoplanet Surveying Satellite (TESS) in 2017, the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb Telescope) in 2018, and perhaps the proposed Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope - Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets (WFIRST-AFTA) early in the next decade. But while these telescopes will give scientists the opportunity to look for signatures of life in the atmospheres of planets outside the solar system, known as exoplanets, they won't be capable of detecting whether the life forms are brainy beings or single-celled microbes.
"We believe we're very close to finding life on another planet," Seager told a packed audience Monday. "I think everyone wants to see intelligent life - it's sort of part of our culture," Seager told Live Science. "But we're really just going to be happy to see anything at all."
Meanwhile, astronomers believe it is very likely that every single star in our Milky Way galaxy has at least one planet, Seager told the NASA panel. "Just imagine the moment, when we find potential signatures of life. Imagine the moment when the world wakes up and the human race realizes that its long loneliness in time and space may be over - the possibility we're no longer alone in the universe," said Matt Mountain, director and Webb telescope scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, adding that the moment is likely to happen within the next 20 years.
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has dramatically changed what we know about exoplanets since it launched in 2009, finding most of more than 5,000 potential exoplanets, of which more than 1,700 have been confirmed, according to IANS. It was also responsible for helping to locate the first Earth-size planet to orbit in the "habitable zone" of a star, the region where liquid water can pool on the surface.
