This question is as old as humankind itself. For millennia, people have
turned their eyes to the stars and wondered if there are others like
themselves out there.
Does life, be it similar to our own or not, exist
elsewhere in our Solar System? Our Galaxy? Until 1992, when the first
exoplanet was confirmed, it was uncertain whether there were even any
planets outside those in our own Solar System. Today we know of over 900
planets around other stars and thousands of planet candidates. Do any
of these planets have conditions that would support life? What
conditions favor the formation of terrestrial-class planets in
developing planetary systems? NASA can help address these questions by
developing missions designed to find and characterize extrasolar
planetary systems.
Before we can determine if there are other planetary systems capable of
supporting life, we must first find them. NASA Science pursues this goal
by supporting a focused suite of ground-based observations through the
Kepler mission, a space-based observatory which studied the prevalence
(how many there are per star) of extrasolar planets, and through the
development of the TESS mission which will use an array of telescopes to
perform an all-sky survey to discover transiting exoplanets ranging
from Earth-sized to gas giants.
-- NASA Science [Astrophysics]
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