At the request of the astronomy community, NASA is developing a space telescope devoted to hunting down habitable planets around other stars — and it could allow us to finally answer the ultimate question: Are we alone in the universe?
Once every decade, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine surveys the astronomy and astrophysics community, identifying its priorities for the next 10 years and soliciting its recommendations for project funding.
The latest report based on that survey, dubbed Astro2020, was released in November 2021. It lists three priority science areas, and one of them is to discover Earth-like exoplanets, with the goal of determining whether we are alone in the universe.
“The task for the next decades will be finding the easiest of such planets to characterize, and then studying them in detail, searching for signatures of life,” according to the report.
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