NASABeyond

Have you tried unplugging it then plugging it back in about 20 seconds later? -- S. Rinehart

never split up and don't turn around. Sh

This is one of the most intriguing questions out there right now, and would have a profound impact on the way we view ourselves.

Our goal is to turn this from something people speculate about into something we can analyze with data and observations. And that moment could be within our grasp over the next generation. -sddg

A lot of people here do! Most of the rest of us enjoy the comics and facebook posts from those that do.

I know at least one colleague that is leading a mission who has replicated their mission in KSP. -sddg

Smoking-Krills—I expect the next 20 or so years is going to be a very busy time for NASA’s search for exoplanets.
In 2017, we will launch the TESS (http://tess.gsfc.nasa.gov/), a mission that will use the transit technique to conduct an all-sky survey for planets around the nearest and brightest stars to the Earth.
Close on its heels, in 2018, will come JWST (http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/), NASA’s next Great Observatory. JWST will be a 6.5-m infrared space telescope that will be able to follow-up on many of the planets that TESS discovers to figure out what their atmospheres are made up of and what their temperatures are.
A little further out, say in the mid-2020s, we are starting to plan a mission called WFIRST (http://wfirst.gsfc.nasa.gov/). Part of the WFIRST mission will be to use a technique called gravitational microlensing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_microlensing) to discover planets—even free-floating planets that are not in orbit around a star! WFIRST will also have a coronagraph—an instrument that will block out the light from a star and let us see Jupiter- and Neptune- sized planets directly. Of course, the ultimate goal of NASA’s (and humanity’s) search for exoplanets is to find other worlds capable of supporting life—Earth 2.0. Beyond WFIRST, perhaps as soon as the 2030’s, we would like to fly a mission that would enable us to directly image truly Earth-sized rocky planets in the solar neighborhood (within perhaps 50-100 light years of the Earth. That mission will be able to measure the composition of those planets’ atmosphere’s, the temperature distribution on their surfaces, and search for evidence that they have life. It is exciting to think that in the next 20-30 years, we may realistically be able to answer one of the oldest questions of humankind—Are we alone? - DMH