NASA has assembled an unprecedented scientific team to find life on far-away worlds.
Termed NExSS (NASA Exoplanet System Science), this virtual institute will benefit from the expertise of several dozen scientists in the effort to find clues to life on planets around other stars.
Hiroshi Imanaka, a research scientist at the SETI Institute, said that one major thrust of the exoplanet community has been to find worlds orbiting in the so-called habitable zone, and that's the range of distances from a star where a planet could have temperatures permitting liquid oceans.
However, liquid oceans are not the only condition under which life can exist. Some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are examples of places that are not in the conventional habitable zone, but might be nonetheless habitable.
The study of planets around other stars, so-called exoplanets, is a relatively new field. Since the launch of NASA's Kepler space telescope six years ago, thousands of exoplanet candidates have been found, and it's this sudden storm of new worlds that has prompted efforts to learn if any exhibit clues to the presence of biology, such as oxygen or methane in their atmospheres.
Discovering exoplanets has largely been the work of astronomers, but its planetary scientists and astrobiologists who have the expertise to characterize planetary environments and examine them for biology.
The intention of NExSS would be to bring practitioners of these multiple disciplines together so they can collaborate on efforts to not simply find exoplanets, but see if any are home to life.