Nasa has outlined the agency’s next moves towards finding life beyond Earth, an ongoing journey that involves a number of current and future telescopes.

Speaking at a public talk held at Nasa headquarters in Washington, experts from the space agency and its partner institutions added that finding intelligence outside our planet is within reach.

Sara Seager – Professor of Planetary Science and Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts – said: “Sometime in the near future, people will be able to point to a star and say, ‘that star has a planet like Earth’.”

“Astronomers think it is very likely that every single star in our Milky Way galaxy has at least one planet.”

Today’s modern telescopes can look at hundreds of stars and tell if they have one or more orbiting planets.

And they can even determine if the planets are the right distance away from their host star to contain liquid water, which is the key ingredient to life as we know it.

NASA plans to lauch new telescopes in the next few years, including the incredible Webb Space Telescope.

This state-of-the-art machine will search for oceans in the form of atmospheric water vapour – and look for life on nearby planets that are similar to Earth in size and mass.

“This technology we are using to explore exoplanets is real,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

“The James Webb Space Telescope and the next advances are happening now. These are not dreams – this is what we do at NASA.”

NASA is convinced that life can be found and that we are not alone in the universe.

“What we didn’t know five years ago is that perhaps 10 to 20 percent of stars around us have Earth-size planets in the habitable zone,” says Matt Mountain, director and Webb telescope scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

“It’s within our grasp to pull off a discovery that will change the world for ever.

“It is going to take a continuing partnership between NASA, science, technology, the U.S. and international space endeavours, as exemplified by the James Webb Space Telescope, to build the next bridge to humanity’s future.”

Agencies/Canadajournal