Terrestrial Planet Finder

11.22.09

Instant Expert: Alien Hunting

The Big Question: How do we find life outside Earth?

By Corey Binns Posted 09.18.2009 at 12:30 pm 0 Comments

How to Find Life: When starlight passes through a planet’s atmosphere, certain elements absorb specific wavelengths of light, and these show up as dips in the spectrum. McKibillo

If aliens are out there, the best shot at finding them—assuming they resemble the life-forms on Earth—is to look for planets like ours. E.T.’s home will probably require an atmosphere to have liquid water and keep out solar radiation, so astronomers search for perfectly sized and situated planets surrounded by blankets of life-supporting gases like oxygen and water vapor. Now they know how to recognize that ideal atmosphere.

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READ MORE ABOUT > aliens, carbon dioxide, feature, nasa, October 2009, oxygen, planets, Terrestrial Planet Finder, water

To The Moon or Bust

Tight on funds, NASA cuts key science programs to foot the bill for manned missions to space

By Stefano Coledan Posted 05.01.2006 at 1:00 am 0 Comments

In July, the space shuttle Discovery is slated to deliver two tons of hardware and supplies to the partially built International Space Station. This mission is paid for. As for the 16 more needed to finish assembly, as mandated by President George W. Bush two years ago in his Vision for Space Exploration policy, NASA is short by as much as $5 billion.

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Next Big Things

These 10 telescopes won't just revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos, they´ll change everything we think a telescope can be

By William Speed Weed Posted 03.31.2005 at 1:00 pm 1 Comment

We´ve never known
more about the universe than we do right
now-and that´s precisely the problem.
Every significant astronomical discovery of
the past 50 years-afterglow from the
big bang, evidence of dark matter,
planets circling distant stars, just to name a few-has helped to create an ever-larger and more perplexing set of cosmic questions: Is there life on those faraway planets? How
did the first stars form after the big bang?

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