NASA's New Team Is Dedicated Only To Finding Aliens, And Here's Why

Aliens have long fascinated mankind, regardless of whether or not they believe in the existence of extraterrestrials. Now, NASA has formed a team dedicated to finding life beyond Earth in the hopes of solving the age-old question: Are we alone?

On its official Twitter page, NASA revealed that it plans to amp up its efforts in detecting lifeforms outside our planet. This week, the Center for Life Detection Science (CLDS) will be launched in Silicon Valley as NASA's new arm in the search for life and concrete answers on how life began on Earth and where it could exist elsewhere.

The research team will be part of the U.S. space agency's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California and will comprise of a "new consortium of researchers" from NASA and other organizations with specializations in biology, physical science, astrophysics and more, according to NASA's website.

“The search for life beyond Earth cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach… to give ourselves the best shot at success, we need to develop tools and strategies that are tailored to detecting life in the unique conditions of other worlds, which are very different not only from Earth but also from each other,” Tori Hoehler, the principal investigator of CLDS and a researcher at Ames, said.

“We now have the scientific and engineering expertise to address this profound question [are we alone?] with the clarity of scientific evidence — and we have a great community of scientists ready for that grand challenge,” Hoehler continued.

The CLDS will be joined by teams from Georgetown University in Washington, DC and Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. The teams will form the Network for Life Detection (NfoLD), which will focus on improving future missions with the goal of finding life beyond our planet.

Another team, the Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures, will focus on the detection of biosignatures of lifeforms in other planets and celestial objects that could be very different from those found on Earth.

Meanwhile, the Oceans Across Space and Time team will try to determine the likelihood of past or present life in the solar system’s icy, outer moons or on ancient Mars.

Over the next several months, dozens of teams will join the project, which has been modeled after NASA's Nexus for Exoplanet System Science in 2015. The latter was developed to study the habitability of faraway planets.

The CLDS and its new teams are expected to work hand-in-hand on future space missions.