It has been billed as NASA’s ‘asteroid autumn’ and involves a trio of exciting missions that could answer some truly mind-boggling questions.  

From offering clues to how life on Earth began, to unlocking the secrets of the solar system, key milestones for each voyage are due to play out over the next six weeks.

They include one rocket launch, a distant fly-by between Jupiter and Mars, and the recovery of ancient space rocks in the Utah desert that could contain the ingredients for life.

Of the three, the lift-off of NASA’s Psyche spacecraft probably sounds the most mundane — but no so fast.

That is also a fascinating mission, because it is setting off on a 2.5 billion-mile (4 billion-kilometre) journey to find out once and for all if a metal-rich asteroid really could bring down the world’s economy. 

1. Visit to $10,000 QUADRILLION space rock

Psyche is due to lift-off on October 5 on its way to the asteroid 16 Psyche, which scientists think may be packed full of precious metals with a value in excess of $10,000 quadrillion (£8,072 quadrillion).

Others dispute this and say it is just hard rock, but NASA should be able to tell either way when its orbiter gets to the asteroid in July 2029. 

One thing it definitely won’t look like is anything resembling what you might find in a jewellery store, however. 

‘I would love for it to look like a shiny, polished, what’s called a pallasite meteorite — with the shiny silver metal and the beautiful gold and green jewel-like silicate minerals in between,’ said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the mission’s principal investigator.

‘But it’s not going to look like that. Because no one’s been onto Psyche, cut it open and polished it.’

She added: ‘It’s been hanging out in space, getting solar wind hitting it for a really, really long time. So the surfaces are not likely to be shiny.’

If 16 Psyche is in fact loaded with precious metals, it could be worth a huge amount of money, according to Dr Linda Elkins-Tanton, a space scientist at MIT. 

She has calculated that the iron in 16 Psyche alone would be worth $10,000 quadrillion (£8,072 quadrillion). 

Assuming the market for asteroid materials is on Earth, this could cause the value of precious metals to plummet, completely devaluing all holdings including those of governments, and all companies involved in mining, distributing and trading such commodities. 

Ultimately, it could lead to the collapse of the entire economy.

Of course it’s all speculative and hypothetical, because even if the space rock was worth anywhere close to that kind of money, it’s not like it could easily be brought back to Earth.

Engineers in California are currently getting the spacecraft ready to journey to 16 Psyche, which sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The orbiter is due to piggy-back into space on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket which is scheduled to lift off from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than 10:38 ET (15:38 BST) on October 5. 

2. Recover sample from a 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid 

A separate team of NASA scientists is also gearing up to recover a capsule containing fragments of the asteroid Bennu.

The 8.8oz (250g) sample of rock and dust will be dropped back to Earth by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft and is due to land in Utah’s western desert on September 24.

An acronym for ‘Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer’, OSIRIS-REx became the first US mission to collect a sample from an asteroid when it briefly touched down on Bennu in October 2020 and scooped up material with its robotic arm. 

The space rock is about the size of the Empire State Building and around 200 million miles away from us.

It is of great interest to scientists because it is believed to contain microscopic mineral grains that pre-date the solar system.

This carbon-rich material is also thought to hold the preserved building blocks of life and could help experts better understand how the planets were formed and how life originated on Earth.

The sample that OSIRIS-REx recovered is the largest by a NASA mission since the Apollo astronauts returned with moon rocks in the 1960s and 70s.

It will be brought back to Earth and land at the Utah Test and Training Range in just over a week’s time. 

The precious rocks and dust will then be housed at a new lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, which is home to hundreds of pounds of lunar material collected by the 12 Apollo moonwalkers.

3. Fly-by on the way to Jupiter’s Trojans

Meanwhile, a spacecraft named Lucy – launched in October 2021 to study eight asteroids that orbit Jupiter – will pass its first space rock called Dinkinesh on November 1.

During its 12-year journey the probe will be the first to tour the so-called Trojan asteroids, which are seen as ‘time capsules from the birth of our solar system’. 

Although Lucy will get its first close-up look at a space rock in six weeks’ time, its maiden Trojan asteroid flyby will not happen for another four years, when the spacecraft gets closer to Jupiter in August 2027.

The vast majority of the asteroid visits will happen in 2027 and 2028, with a final asteroid flyby scheduled to happen in March 2033.

The first will take place in April 2025, when Lucy visits a space rock in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars known as Donaldjohanson. 

This will be followed by a trip to seven Trojan asteroids that are named after characters from Greek mythology.

They are Eurybates, Queta, Polymele, Leucus, Orus, Patroclus and Menoetius.  

All of the Trojans are thought to be abundant in dark carbon compounds.

Below an insulating blanket of dust, they are probably rich in water and other volatile substances, dating back to the first days of the solar system.

No other space mission in history has been launched to as many different destinations in independent orbits around our sun. Lucy will show us, for the first time, the diversity of the primordial bodies that built the planets. 

NASA has said the $981 million (£715 million) mission will revolutionise our knowledge of planetary origins and the formation of the solar system, giving insight into planetary evolution. 

It takes its name from the fossilised human ancestor, named ‘Lucy’ by her discovers, whose skeleton provided unique insights into our evolution. 

As well as viewing some of the oldest rocks in the solar system, Lucy’s path will cross the Earth three times, as it uses our planet’s gravity to aid in its positioning.

This move will make it the first ever spacecraft to return to Earth from the outer solar system, as all the others are either still going – in the case of the Viking probes – or burnt up in the atmosphere of a gas giant, as was the case with Cassini and Saturn.

The inaugural boss of NASA‘s newly-created UFO research division has been named as a former meteorologist and liaison to the Pentagon.

Mark McInerney will become the US space agency’s director of research into unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), more commonly known as unidentified flying objects.

NASA officials initially refused to reveal McInerney’s identity amid fears he would be harassed, before later backtracking on the decision.

Speaking about the new UFO boss following the release of the agency’s highly-anticipated study into more than 800 UAP sightings, NASA’s associate administrator Nicola Fox told reporters: ‘They have been working there a while now, during the study, to help be a point of contact.’

But when directly asked whether she could name the official, Fox replied: ‘We will not give his name out.’

All changed hours later, however, when NASA sent out a press release that included McInerney’s name and revealed he previously worked as the agency’s liaison to the Pentagon.

There has been no explanation as to why McInerney’s identity was revealed when NASA initially declined to do so.

However, it emerged at last night’s briefing that several members of the independent study group had received threats, hate mail and been ridiculed on social media.  

Some were even apparently told to stay away from researching UFOs because it could damage their scientific credibility. 

‘That’s in part why we are not splashing the name of our new director out there, because science needs to be free,’ Dan Evans, the NASA official in charge of the study, originally said.

‘Some of [the incidents] rose to actual threats.’

The newly-formed UFO research division will continue studying UAPs, even though the space agency yesterday ruled out that aliens were to blame for some 800 such sightings over almost three decades.

These are defined as objects ‘that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective’. 

In a landmark report commissioned by NASA last year and published on Thursday, an independent panel of 16 experts stressed that there was ‘no reason to conclude’ that any of the sightings they analysed were extraterrestrial in origin. 

However, the team did warn that mysterious flying objects were a ‘self-evident’ threat to American airspace. 

Even though they poured cold water on the extraterrestrial hypothesis, NASA’s experts did not deny the possibility of a ‘potential unknown alien technology operating in Earth’s atmosphere.’ 

Their 33-page report called for NASA to utilise its technological might to continue studying UFOs because many cases remain unsolved — and researchers still have no idea what some of these sightings are.

NASA chief Bill Nelson announced that a new director for UFO research would help implement the panel’s recommendations. 

Following a news briefing setting out the findings, he said: ‘I want to thank the independent study team for providing insight on how NASA can better study and analyse UAP in the future. 

‘NASA’s new Director of UAP Research will develop and oversee the implementation of NASA’s scientific vision for UAP research, including using NASA’s expertise to work with other agencies to analyse UAP and applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to search the skies for anomalies. 

‘NASA will do this work transparently for the benefit of humanity.’

McInerney’s new role will see him ‘centralise communications, resources, and data analytical capabilities to establish a robust database for the evaluation of future UAP’, NASA said.

‘He also will leverage NASA’s expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and space-based observation tools to support and enhance the broader government initiative on UAP,’ the space agency added.

Since 1996, McInerney has worked in various positions, spending time at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the National Hurricane Center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The NASA advisory panel’s new report analysed hundreds of potential UFO sightings, albeit with a budget of just $100,000 (£80,500) and just nine months to conduct their work.

The panel noted that, to date, most UAPs are recorded with sensors and other equipment intended for nonscientific purposes, under accidental or ‘serendipitous’ circumstances that are far from ideal.

Evidence from nearly all UFO cases, in other words, was not collected with enough scientific rigour for experts to reach reliable conclusions in the panel’s view.  

‘Coupled with incomplete data archiving and curation,’ the NASA panel wrote, ‘this means that the origin of numerous UAP [UFOs] remain uncertain.’

They concluded that in their scientific view, the bar for proof of extraterrestrial visitors to our planet must be kept high. 

‘In the search for life beyond Earth, extraterrestrial life itself must be the hypothesis of last resort,’ the panel wrote, ‘the answer we turn to only after ruling out all other possibilities.’ 

‘As Sherlock Holmes said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”.’ 

Back in May, NASA’s independent study team shared their preliminary observations — that up to 98 per cent of reported UAP sightings can be explained away.

Just 2 to 5 percent are considered ‘possibly really anomalous’, the panel added, but a lack of high-quality data is hampering researchers’ ability to apply ‘rigorous scientific scrutiny’ to the mystery-solving. 

NASA’s study is separate from the Pentagon’s investigation into UAPs, which saw US lawmakers hear first-hand accounts of UFO sightings from former members of the military earlier this year.

That Pentagon study, led by the Defense Department’s new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and directed by Pentagon physicist Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, has received 350 reports of UFOs in the past two years. 

Almost half, or precisely 171 of those UFO cases, remain unexplained. 

Although their is cross-collaboration, the US space agency’s panel is focused on the civilian, unclassified side of this effort, while AARO leads the charge on examining UAPs in coordination with the intelligence and military communities.

NASA’s James Webb discovers new carbon compound in space that forms the foundations of all known life: Molecule was detected 1,350 light-years from Earth in the Orion Nebula

By Stacy Liberatore For Dailymail.com

Updated: 17:29 EDT, 26 June 2023

The first-ever public meeting of NASA‘s ‘independent study group’ on UFOs dropped major revelations about unexplained objects tracked ‘all over the world.’ 

It also included serious calls for more resources to examine UFOs, now more technically described as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) to better include the range of sightings and cases under study.

Comprised of 16 experts ranging from physicists to astronauts, NASA’s study group had a lot to say during their four-hour meeting, which covered everything from the search for alien artifacts to the problem of online harassment by UFO trolls.

The study group, the first of its kind from the US space agency, has been conducting its work since last June and is expected to release their final recommendations to NASA in late July.

Here are the six main takeaways from yesterday’s meeting.

Serious scientists want to search for alien tech in our solar system

‘Within the scientific community, there is a widespread, but by no means universal belief that there are extraterrestrial civilizations,’ astrobiologist David Grinspoon told his fellow UAP task force members.

‘The same rationale which supports the idea that ET civilizations may exist and may be detectable,’ Grinspoon said, ‘also supports the idea that finding extraterrestrial artifacts in our own solar system is at least plausible.’

Grinspoon, who has served as an advisor to NASA on space exploration strategy in the past, then recommended that the space agency take the lead trying to find these alien artifacts, if they’re out there. 

‘Most of the solar system has not been searched for artifacts and anomalies,’ he pointed out, noting: ‘NASA is the lead agency for solar system exploration.’ 

‘These modest data analysis efforts could potentially be applied to existing and planned planetary missions,’ Grinspoon said.

This was not the first time Grinspoon has made the case for hunting for alien ‘technosignatures’ within our solar system or even our own planet, calling dismissive attitudes toward the idea ‘intellectually lazy.’ 

‘Our infant civilization has already launched five spacecraft that will wander the galaxy, and we’re trying to figure out how to send tiny spacecraft to nearby exoplanets,’ Grinspoon wrote earlier this year in Sky & Telescope. 

‘Imagine what an aged ET civilization might have achieved and what machines might have entered our solar system over billions of years.’ 

‘If NASA applies the same rigorous methodology toward UAPs that it applies to the study of possible life elsewhere, then we stand to learn something new and interesting.’

Percentage of unresolved UAP cases remains consistent with the past

The director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), physicist Sean Kirkpatrick told NASA’s UAP group that the number of military UAP sightings his group would classify as ‘possibly really anomalous’ come to somewhere between two to five percent of AARO’s total database. 

That percentage is remarkably consistent with past rates for unresolved UFO and UAP cases, including those by the Pentagon’s Cold War-era UFO bureau, Project Blue Book, which ran to about four and 5.9 percent in the 1950s.

Astronomers polled in 1977 by Stanford astrophysics professor Peter Sturrock, 2,611 members of the American Astronomical Society, resulted in a similar statistic: 62 astronomers out of 1,356 respondents, or 4.6 percent, reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena.

Some academic scientists, including SUNY Albany physicist Kevin Knuth, have suggested that this consistency might suggest that the phenomena is more likely to be real and not just random noise.

The US military is tracking strange ‘metallic orbs’ spotted ‘all over the world’ 

Kirkpatrick replayed one example of an unsolved UAP case: video by a US military MQ-9 Reaper drone recorded last year in the Mid East and depicting a bizarre flying metallic orb.

‘This is a typical example of the thing that we see most of,’ Kirkpatrick told NASA’s UAP panel. ‘We see these all over the world.’

‘And we see these making very interesting apparent maneuvers,’ Kirkpatrick added. ‘This one in particular, however, I would point out, demonstrated no enigmatic technical capabilities and was no threat to airborne safety.’

‘Being able to come to some conclusion is going to take time,’ he said, ‘until we can get better resolved data on similar objects that we can then do a larger analysis on.’

Kirkpatrick also told the panel that AARO is receiving, on average, about 50 to 100 reports of UAPs per month — a figure which means that roughly one truly weird, inexplicable case is arriving on their desks each week. 

He also noted that there were occasional spikes in sightings, coinciding with events like Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite launches or the frenzy over China’s spy balloon this past February. 

Kirkpatrick also mentioned procedural reasons for these spikes in UAP cases, as with a new influx of data via AARO’s recent coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which provided 100 or so new UAP reports to his office.

Such coordination was the order of the day during the meeting. ‘NASA embeds,’ scientists who have been cleared for work on classified UAP cases, are also working closely with the Pentagon’s official UFO investigators on a few top secret UFO cases, Kirkpatrick said. 

The infamous ‘GOFAST’ UAP wasn’t going fast at all 

As one of the pilots shouts in the infrared targeting video of the mysterious ‘GOFAST’ UFO, ‘Whoa! Got it!’ 

One of NASA’s panel member’s Josh Semeter, an engineering professor at Boston University’s center for space physics, presented a detailed analysis of fighter jet’s trajectory relative to the ‘GOFAST’ UAP.

It turns out that the mystery object was actually cruising at about 40 mph.

‘So, that’s a velocity that is consistent with wind speeds at 13,000 feet,’ Semeter said, pointing out that this was the calculated altitude for the GOFAST UAP. 

Making such a compelling case that the GOFAST was likely an object sailing in a strong breeze was possible, he noted, because of the infrared video’s technical readout and interface. 

‘Fortunately the information needed to determine the altitude and velocity of this object is contained on the display,’ Semeter explained. 

Online harassments has plagued NASA’s UAP panel

Multiple members of the team, over the course of NASA’s four-hour public meeting, referenced abuse from UFO trolls, cranky skeptics and others, both online and within their own institutions.

‘It is really disheartening to hear of the harassment that our panelists have faced online all because they’re studying this topic,’ said Nicky Fox, the associate administrator for the NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. 

‘NASA stands behind our panelists and we do not tolerate abuse,’ she added. 

‘Harassment only leads to further stigmatization of the UAP field, significantly hindering scientific progress and discouraging others to study this important subject matter.’ 

Daniel Evans, also with NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, assured the panel that ‘NASA’s security team is actively addressing this issue.’

The issue appears to be a persistent feature of the social stigma surrounding UFOs, with Kirkpatrick mentioning that he and members of his AARO team at the Pentagon have had similar experiences.

‘My team and I have also been subjected to lots of harassment,’ Kirkpatrick said, ‘especially coming out of my last hearing [to the Senate’s Armed Services Committee] because people don’t understand the scientific method.’

‘People want answers now,’ Kirkpatrick noted, explaining that AARO has faced heated and counterproductive pressure from the public for fast answers on UAP.

NASA’s panel wants the tools to study UAP seriously

Former senior NASA official Mike Gold, now an executive vice president at the private space firm Redwire, voiced his opinion that NASA should impanel a permanent office for the study of UAP, and his colleagues sounded no less serious.

A recurring theme of the public meeting was the need for higher quality data, not just from UAP cases, but more data from the many more mundane things that could be mistaken for truly unusual phenomena.

Panel member and astronomer Federica Bianco, pointed out that UAP researchers will need ‘a thorough and deep understanding of what is normal, to tease out what is unusual.’

The study group’s chair, astrophysicist David Spergel, emphasized repeatedly the need for better data collection equipment and methods, if NASA or any other research organization is to tackle the UAP issue successfully.  

‘If I were to summarize in one month what we’ve learned, we need high-quality data,’ said Spergel, who devoted much of his professional life to teasing meaning out of faint signals from deep out in the universe. 

‘The lesson of my career is you want to address important questions with high-quality data and well-calibrated instruments.’

NASA is due to hold a historic public meeting about UFOs tomorrow — as the once-mocked subject becomes mainstream.

The space agency launched an independent task force which has been studying unidentified objects in our skies and oceans since September of last year.

Tomorrow’s panel will see a broad discussion of NASA’s ‘science perspective’ on UAP, alongside more specific and exotic presentations, including one NASA astrobiologist breaking down ‘relevant observations’ of anomalies ‘beyond Earth’s atmosphere.’ 

Tomorrow’s meeting, which is expected to last over four hours, will make history as the first time America’s space agency has presented any results from its UAP investigation to the public.

The mere existence of the agency’s independent study team has added greater legitimacy to many unusual claims and events that had previously spent decades relegated to the fringes of scientific inquiry.  

The study group, formed nearly a year ago in June 2022, has been mandated to explore both the feasibility and the wisdom of tasking NASA’s own hardware and brainpower in the hunt for ‘unidentified anomalous phenomena’ (UAP).

The term UAP is meant to broaden the search for the truth about UFOs, encompassing both mysterious objects or occurrences whether in the sky, underwater or in outer space. 

‘The charter of this committee was to recommend to NASA whether research is warranted on this subject,’ according to Harvard physicist Avi Loeb, founder of the extraterrestrial-hunting, UAP-studying Galileo Project. 

‘They were not supposed to do any research,’ Loeb told the DailyMail.com. ‘They were not supposed to conduct new scientific study into the question, but just listen to witnesses that tell them what was reported in the past.’ 

NASA has previously stated that they possess no current evidence that UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin, nor any hard evidence of alien life out in the universe. 

But they have also stated that the limited state of the current data makes it difficult to draw scientific conclusions.

While their group is scheduled to publish the full results of their nine-month UFO study this July, tomorrow’s public hearing is shaping up to look more like a sprawling interagency task force.

UFO reports will be delivered by both the head of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), physicist Sean Kirkpatrick, and an advisor to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Surveillance Services Office, Mike Freie.

The meeting will go live on NASA TV, the agency’s official YouTube channel, at 10:30 am ET, 1430 GMT on Wednesday (May 31).

The panel will even answer written questions put to them by the public, which can be voted on via a dedicated NASA page here.

Thomas Zurbuchen, previously the associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, announced the independent study group last June by saying: ‘NASA believes that the tools of scientific discovery are powerful and apply here also.

‘We have access to a broad range of observations of Earth from space – and that is the lifeblood of scientific inquiry.

‘We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That’s the very definition of what science is. That’s what we do.’

But some academics, like Harvard’s Avi Loeb, say the federal space agency is already playing catch-up on the science behind UFOS.

‘Bill Nelson. the head of NASA, said that as a Senator he saw the classified data behind these UAP reports and the hair on the back of his neck stood up,’ Loeb recalled. 

He added that Nelson’s professed interest in the topic led him to discuss his own UAP research with the NASA chief’s then-subordinate, Thomas Zurbuchen. 

‘He asked me to send a white paper on this, which I did, and this led to the establishment of this study,’ Loeb told the DailyMail.com, ‘but I never heard back from Thomas Zurbuchen until, a year later, when I heard that they established this [NASA study group].’

Loeb, who had already started his Galileo Project at Harvard by then, was not invited to contribute to NASA’s study group, he said, because Zurbuchen felt his new project might leave the impression of a conflict of interest. 

‘When I asked Zurbuchen a year later why,’ Loeb recalled, ‘He said, “Well, but you’ve already established the Galileo Project and we want this study to be indifferent to the subject, for the members to have no vested interest in the subject.”‘

Loeb says that the Galileo Project has already raised about $5 million for its UAP investigation efforts, including land-based observatories to watch the skies for signs of the phenomenon. 

This summer, Loeb plans to travel to the Pacific Ocean to obtain and study the remnants of the first interstellar meteor to hit Earth. ‘This is an expedition that costs $1.5 million itself,’ Loeb told the DailyMail.com.

‘I don’t know what they will recommend tomorrow,’ Loeb said of NASA’s public presentations, ‘but if they say that scientific research on this subject is warranted the Galileo Project is already doing that. 

‘We have been doing it for two years now.’ 

But the Galileo Project is not the only professional group of scientists waiting for NASA’s imprimatur of authority to begin their own UAP investigations.

Last October, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, an industry group which includes aviators, engineers and scientists from country’s largest military and NASA contractors, launched its own UAP taskforce.

Dubbed the AIAA’s Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Community of Interest, the group will be co-chaired by former Navy fighter pilot and UAP research advocate Ryan Graves and NASA planetary scientist Ravi Kopparapu. 

Kopparapu, who researches the potential habitability of Earth-like exoplanets for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, has advocated publicly for the scientific community to take UAP seriously since 2020. He told the the DailyMail.com that he had optimism about his employers’ own UAP investigations. 

‘I was not consulted by the study team,’ Kopparapu said, but added, ‘I am looking forward to hearing from the team tomorrow.’

Humans are on the cusp of detecting alien life on a distant planet.

This is according to scientists who said that based on all that is known about physics, biology and chemistry, ‘we are not alone’ in the universe.

Experts believe NASA‘s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) – the most powerful device ever launched into space – will help lead the charge in discovering an exoplanet hospitable for life in the next 25 years.

Astrophysicist Sasha Quanz, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, believes aliens will be confirmed in two and a half decades, but JWST will not do it – its successors will. 

These statements are echoed in a recent study from the University of California that stated extraterrestrials will make contact with humans by 2029, but not with the help of telescopes.

The UC study looked at radio wave transmission sent to Pioneer 10 in 2002 by NASA – a routine protocol to transmit and collect data.

The signal reached a star roughly 27 light-years from our planet as transmission spreads out when they contact an object.

The UC researchers hope this signal was intercepted by extraterrestrials that returned a callback to Earth.

The JWST has already detected carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere of two exoplanets outside our Solar System – the first-ever observations of this kind.

This is because JWST can analyze molecules in the atmosphere of distant worlds and identify those essential for life. 

Building off of the technology and success of JWST, NASA is developing a multi-billion successor tasked with searching for life on Earth-like planets as soon as the early 2040s.

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HabEx) will specifically examine the air of Earth-like ‘exoplanets’ for signs they could sustain life.

A recent PBS documentary, New Eye on the Universe, explains how JWST is poised to locate creation’s faint fingerprints left in the atmospheres of exoplanets using the telescope’s sophisticated spectroscopes.

JWST was not designed to study exoplanets, just ancient stars in the universe, but its abilities have surpassed expectations due to its powerful technologies. 

‘There are two types of science instruments,’ said Mike Menzel, lead mission systems engineer for JWST, in the PBS show.

‘Cameras that produce images and spectroscopes that produce rainbows.’

The colors of the rainbow form according to a specific molecule detected in an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

‘I think Mike’s analogy of a rainbow is a good one,’ Lee Feinberg, JWST’s optical telescope manager at NASA Goddard, told the DailyMail.com.

‘You’re spreading the light into its different colors, but the key is that what we’re comparing is when the planet is passing in front of the star versus when it’s behind the star.’ 

What helps the JWST make these comparisons, Feinberg says, is that its sensors can see farther past the visible light spectrum than previous telescopes like Hubble could — deep into the infrared light spectrum.

This allows scientists to see the amount of water, sodium, carbon dioxide, and methane lurking in the atmosphere, which they can either dig deeper into the exoplanet or move on to the next.

‘There are a lot of molecules, classic examples being carbon dioxide and water, where the best wavelength to do it is in the infra-red where Webb sees,’ Feinberg told the DailyMail.com.

‘Which is why, very early on,’ Feinberg says, ‘Webb made the first ever confirmed detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet’s atmosphere.’

In November 2022, JWST showed just how much it’s become a significant player in the search for alien life after successfully revealing the makeup of an exoplanet’s atmosphere in never before seen detail.

JWST’s powerful instruments captured atoms and molecules, along with signs of active chemistry and clouds – features Hubble and Spitzer could not detect when they observed the planet and those with evidence of signs of life.

The target was WASP-39b, a hot Saturn 700 light-years away from Earth.

‘In 30 years, scientists have gone from barely being able to detect exoplanets to characterizing key chemical clues in their atmospheres, like water, using facilities like the James Webb Space Telescope,’ researchers from Michigan State University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) penned for The Conversation.

JWST telescopes’ work is crucial for future missions capable of looking deeper into an exoplanet.

HabEx will search for potential signs of habitability in the atmospheres of exoplanets by seeking signs of water and other biosignature gases, including oxygen and ozone. 

‘HabEx will be sensitive to all types of planets; however its main goal is, for the first time, to directly image Earth-like exoplanets, and characterize their atmospheric content,’ NASA shared in a statement.

‘What it can do that’s unique will be to actually study the atmospheres of Earth-like planets around sun-like stars,’ Feinberg explained to the DailyMail.com.  ‘Webb can’t quite do that.’

‘Webb can study exoplanets that are around other types of stars. 

‘And it can see really big gaseous planets around sun-like stars,’ Feinberg said. ‘But it cannot see a rocky Earth-like planet and its atmosphere around a sun-like star.’

Like JWST, HabEX will also detect molecules, such as methane and carbon dioxide, to determine if they have concentrations higher than Earth.

Cambridge scientist Emily Mitchell said: ‘We’ve only got one biosignature, here on Earth. 

‘But if we have in ten or 20 years, as my optimistic colleagues suggest, thousands of biosignatures, we can start addressing [the question of whether we are alone in the cosmos].’

She also explained that if HabEx finds oxygen, water and methane in one atmosphere, ‘you could be like, ‘Yeah, that’s definitely life.”