Will be aided by amateur astronomers.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: NASA recently claimed humanity would find life among the stars in the next 10 to 20 years, and the space agency is now concertedly ramping up its efforts to do so.
The organization has assembled a crack team of extraterrestrial experts to see if any planets discovered outside of our solar system are habitable, reported the Daily Mail.
The team, dubbed “NEXSS” (Nexus for Exoplanet System Science), will be aided by amateur astronomers who will be able to access research data online in what NASA is calling an “unprecedented” collaboration.
NASA has set up a website called Planet Hunters, which allows anyone to search the data gathered by Kepler space telescope. Since the observational platform was launched six years ago, more than 1,000 exoplanets have been found, with thousands of additional candidates waiting to be confirmed.
By applying a ‘system science’ approach, the team hopes to understand an alien planet’s biology interacts with the atmosphere, geology, oceans, and interior of a planet.
“We now recognize that habitable zones are not just around stars, they can be around giant planets too,” said Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA, at a public panel a few weeks ago. “We are finding out the solar system is really a soggy place.”
Green also spoke about a study that analyzed the atmosphere above Mars’ polar ice caps and suggests that 50 percent of the planet’s northern hemisphere once had oceans up to a mile deep, and that it had that water for up to 1.2 billion years.
NASA hopes to land astronauts on Mars in the 2030s, which is crucial to the search for life on Mars, according to the agency’s chief scientist, Ellen Stofan.
“I’m a field geologist; I go out and break open rocks and look for fossils. Those are hard to find,” Stofan stated. “So I have a bias that it’s eventually going to take humans on the surface of Mars — field geologists, astrobiologists, chemists — actually out there looking for that good evidence of life that we can bring back to Earth for all the scientists to argue about.”