NASA steps up in discovering extraterrestrial life

NASA's chief scientist Ellen Stofan, stated at a Washington panel discussion, that in a decade or so, there will be strong indications of life outside Earth. Stofan added that "aliens" doesn't necessarily refer to "little green men" but, this could mean "little microbes." This was announced after NASA discovered that 50 percent of Mars' northern hemisphere once had miles-deep oceans.

span style="line-height: 15.8599996566772px;">MUNTINLUPA, PHILIPPINES (Catholic Online) - The agency reported the possibility of finding aliens in the next 10 to 20 years, so they came up with a group of experts that could track down the existence of extraterrestrial life outside our solar system.

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The team is called Nexss, or Nexus for Exoplanet System Science. They are composed of scientists from 10 universities, including Yale, Berkeley, California, Arizona, Hampton, Yale, Nebraska, and Stanford.

These scientists are expected to present and merge their astronomical research about exoplanets and how to form planetary systems with innovative studies of meteorites and high-grade computer simulations.

There are those in the team who will try to develop breakthroughs on how to find any signs of life in other planets, while searching for biosignatures. Some will research on the diversity of the planets in the solar system, while others will study Earth as a life-bearing planet.  

Some of the team will work on discovering planets that are orbiting other stars in the galaxy.

The study of the exoplanets is somewhat of a new field, having started out in 1995 when the first exoplanet around a star was found. More than one thousand exoplanets have been discovered after the Kepler space telescope was launched back in 2009, and there are still around a thousand more unknown.

NASA's alien hunters are exerting efforts to check out if there could be any habitable planet outside of the solar system. They added that the general public could assist in its discovery with the aliens by having access with research data on the Internet.

NASA came up with the public website, "Planet Hunters" where amateur astronauts and the general public can access data gathered by the Kepler space telescope.

Nexss aims to figure out how the biology of the planets beyond Earth could interact with the planet's interior, geology, atmosphere and oceans.

By the year 2022, NASA plans to set up a mission in the icy moon Europa to check if it is habitable or not. They also plan to bring astronauts to Mars by 2020 to search for any possible signs of life.

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