FRANCE: According to a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory statement, the agency is assembling a multidisciplinary team of experts to search for clues to alien life on planets beyond our solar system. The team, dubbed the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS), will examine he makeup of exoplanets and how their neighbors, including their host star and other planets orbiting it, affect whether they are compatible to life.
Since the first exoplanet was recognized in 1995, over 1,000 have been identified, many by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope in its six years of operation. In addition, thousands of candidate exoplanets await verification. NExSS especially seeks to elucidate how an exoplanet’s parent star influences interactions between the planet’s possible biology and its oceans and geological processes. This whole approach is known as system science.
The NExSS endeavor will use their system science approach to classify exoplanets and determine whether they might be able to support life, as well as develop new technologies to accomplish those goals.
The NExSS team will operate under the auspices of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The team will include scientists from a diverse roster of fields. The Earth Sciences experts will study Earth as a model planet that does support life. Planetary Sciences will examine other worlds in our solar system. Heliophysics will reveal how our host star, the Sun, interacts with and governs processes taking place on Earth and other worlds in our solar system. Astrophysics will furnish information on exoplanets and their host stars so that the system science results from the other disciplines can be applied to those other star systems.
“This interdisciplinary endeavor connects top research teams and provides a synthesized approach in the search for planets with the greatest potential for signs of life,” said Jim Green, NASA’s Director of Planetary Science. “The hunt for exoplanets is not only a priority for astronomers, it’s of keen interest to planetary and climate scientists as well.”
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