Scientists at NASA believe that if everything goes according to plan, an alien planet very much like Earth could soon be discovered which holds life. So with that there has come a strong desire to find that planet and such an undertaking has been growing each year and it appears the interest is only getting stronger. NASA thinks the finding of such a world could easily happen within the next two decades.
At a NASA panel review where main attention was on the search for life in the cosmos, the deliberations focused on the questions whether Earth is alone or not in the Universe, along with the high-tech advances that have been made in the last 10 years that might permit scientists to come up with an answer to such questions.
Matt Mountain, who is the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, spoke at the panel and explained about how it would be when the news broke that scientists had discovered Earth 2.0. He wanted people to imagine the moment when the entire globe woke up to the news that the Earth’s loneliness in space and time might have actually ended and it was possible that those on Earth might no longer be alone in space.
NASA seems to be very determined on discovering Earth 2.0, and with the brand new James Webb Space Telescope that is planned to launch into the cosmos in the year 2018, this is extremely possible. So within the next 20 years, it could happen that scientists might very well find one or more planets which are Earth-like and have on life on them somewhere out in the Universe.
At the present time, it is believed there are about 100 billion planets in the cosmos, and scientists think that quite a few of them could support some sort of life. The task that is facing NASA at the present time is finding out where such planets are located and then it would lead to the next undertaking, which would be producing the technology to get human beings there.
The search has brought scientists this far thanks in part to the Kepler space telescope. It was able to pinpoint numerous planets in its life span, even though it was unable to find any planets that were good enough to be considered to be just like Earth. The James Webb telescope is intended for that very purpose, since it will be placed about 930,000 miles away from the Earth which is around four times the expanse of the Earth from the Moon.
While the Webb telescope will have the capability to find Earth-like planets, it will not be able to tell if the planets are sheltering life on the exterior. The NASA scientists believe that if everything goes as they have planned, they actually think an alien planet very much like Earth could be discovered within the next two decades which holds life. So with that there has come a mission to find that planet and such an undertaking has seen growing amounts of attention with each year that passes.
By Kimberly Ruble
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