NASA is Officially on the Hunt for Alien Life

A new research team for NASA will be dedicated to searching for alien life beyond our planet. The team was launched this week in Silicon Valley and will aim to discover concrete answers on how life began on our world and where life might exist beyond Earth.

The new group is called the Center for Life Detection Science (CLDS), it is part of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and will join together a new collective of researchers both in and out of NASA who have expertise in physical science, biology, astrophysics and more, according to the press release.

Tori Hoehler, the principal investigator of CLDS and a researcher at Ames, explained that searching for life beyond Earth can’t be a one-size-fits-all method. To have the best chances of success, they need to work on tools and strategies that are custom to finding life in the particular conditions of other worlds, which are very different from Earth, as well as each other.

Hoehler added that they currently have the scientific and engineering skills needed to look at the profound question are we alone? And they have a great team of scientists ready for this great feat.

Teams from Georgetown University and the Georgia Institute of Technology will also be joining the CLDS team.

Researchers from Georgetown’s Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures will study the blueprints of life and will try to recognize life in a way that we don’t know yet from distant worlds where life might be so different from Earth’s.

While Georgia Tech’s Oceans Across Space and Time team will investigate the probability of past or current life in the solar system’s icy, outer moons or on the Red Planet.

As the year goes on, many other teams will become part of the project, which is based on NASA’s 2015 Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, which was aimed at examining the habitability of distant planets.

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