Next Generation Telescopes Take Us Closer to Finding Alien Life

Every day we find more exoplanets. With bigger and better telescopes on the horizon, we'll have far more observations of these planets than ever before — and NASA scientists are optimistic we'll discover alien life within decades.

On Monday, a panel of NASA scientists and engineers discussed the roadmap to the next generations of telescopes, and what they hope to learn. The Hubble, Kepler, and Spitzer space telescopes pushed our understanding of planetary dynamics. From the first tentative announcement of an exoplanet discovery, we're now listing literally hundreds of worlds beyond our solar system, scattered amongst the stars.