Is the "other Earth" among the thousands of exoplanets that have already been discovered outside our solar system? New technology being developed by NASA aims to find that out.
The search for other Earths -- planets like our own Earth that would feature atmospheric conditions that could allow for the development of life -- has long been a dream of many scientists among others through the decades.
MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager is one of them, as she told CNN earlier this month, "I want to find another Earth. That's what I'm living for."
Seager is part of NASA's TESS, or Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, project, a two-year space mission set to launch in 2017. It will collect and relay data to the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2018. It's just one of several projects currently in various stages of development, all with the end goal of finding that elusive other Earth.
On Thursday, NASA announced developments related to new technologies that will help them find the elusive earth-like planets beyond the solar system. NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program Office is located at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and Gary Blackwood is the manager of the Exoplanet Exploration Program.
"It's an exciting time for exoplanet research. This is history in the making."
Some of the new technology, described in a NASA media release, will look for exoplanets similar to Earth by looking for clues of to atmosphere and climates. The next generation of instrumentation will use data about the light emitted by the exoplanet to produce a chemical analysis or spectra. The light is split into all the different colors it contains, and their relative concentrations provide information about the conditions on the exoplanet's surface and whether or not they might be habitable in the same way as our Earth.
Telescopes on Earth can only view so far, in part because of the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere. New space missions will use telescopes mounted on spacecraft that observe and relay data from out in space. One of the several proposed space missions that are developing coronagraph technology is the WFIRST, or Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
