Title: Finding Life on Other Worlds - Science in the News
Headings: Finding Life on Other Worlds
Finding Life on Other Worlds
Finding the Pieces of the Puzzle
Looking in the Neighborhood
Current and Future Missions
For more information:

Content: The Curiosity Rover has been studying the surface since 2012, while the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter studies the planet from orbit. Another rover, planned as a successor to Curiosity, will land in 2020. Other places in the solar system being studied by probes include the dwarf planets Pluto and Ceres, along with Saturn’s moons. Looking beyond our solar system, the Kepler telescope will continue its search for exoplanets, and will be joined on its mission by a new telescope, TESS, which will launch later this year. Some of the search for life will also be done by humans. A current NASA proposal intends to land humans on Mars in the 2030s. With current technologies, manned missions further than Mars would not be feasible, as it would simply take too long to reach the farther planets. As a result, humans will continue to rely on robotic probes and rovers to search for other life in our solar system. While we still don’t know how life might manifest on a different world, the search continues. There are several current and future missions that will shed light on this subject for years to come, while the search for planets outside our solar system continues to ignite the imagination.