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The Searchers: Dave Eggers on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab
In all likelihood, in the next 25 years, we’ll find evidence of life on another planet. I’m willing to say this because I’m not a scientist and I don’t work in media relations for NASA. But all evidence points to us getting closer, every year, to identifying moons in our solar system, or exoplanets beyond it, that can sustain life. And if we don’t find conditions for life on the moons near us, we’ll find it on exoplanets — that is, planets outside our solar system. Within the next few decades, we’ll likely find an exoplanet that has an atmosphere, that has water, that has carbon and methane and oxygen. Or some combination of those things.
And thus, the conditions for life. In a few years, NASA will launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will have a panoramic field of vision a hundred times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope. And on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — we’ll call it Roman from here on out — there will be a coronagraph, a device designed to perform something called, beautifully, starlight suppression. Starlight suppression is the blocking of the rays of a faraway star so that we can see behind it and around it. Once we can master starlight suppression, with Roman and NASA’s next astrophysics flagship, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, we’ll find the planets where life might exist.
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In all likelihood, in the next 25 years, we’ll find evidence of life on another planet. I’m willing to say this because I’m not a scientist and I don’t work in media relations for NASA. But all evidence points to us getting closer, every year, to identifying moons in our solar system, or exoplanets beyond it, that can sustain life. And if we don’t find conditions for life on the moons near us, we’ll find it on exoplanets — that is, planets outside our solar system. Within the next few decades, we’ll likely find an exoplanet that has an atmosphere, that has water, that has carbon and methane and oxygen. Or some combination of those things.
And thus, the conditions for life. In a few years, NASA will launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will have a panoramic field of vision a hundred times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope. And on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — we’ll call it Roman from here on out — there will be a coronagraph, a device designed to perform something called, beautifully, starlight suppression. Starlight suppression is the blocking of the rays of a faraway star so that we can see behind it and around it. Once we can master starlight suppression, with Roman and NASA’s next astrophysics flagship, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, we’ll find the planets where life might exist.
More: