Between the images captured by James Webb Space Telescope, what we're learning about black holes and galaxies far far away, and NASA's new Artemis I rocket that's soon to head to the far side of the moon, space exploration has never been so exciting.
While the high-definition imagery being beamed back to earth is jaw-dropping, scientists are also studying them for clues over planets that could be habitable.
Photo: supplied/Nasa
Listen to the full interview
Planetary scientist at the US Space Agency's Goddard Space Flight Center, Ravi Kopparapu, tells Nine to Noon this year will be remembered as a landmark one in understanding space.
“We have an exciting new big telescope up there beaming down really good, really sharp images of the universe," he says.
“In the past week the James Webb Space Telescope that NASA launched discovered the first evidence of carbon dioxide gas on an exoplanet - a planet orbiting another star.
“This is the first time humanity has detected a chemical gas outside our planet, in or around another star. So, this is just a harbinger of more unusual discoveries that we will be seeing coming up.”
The Artemis 1 moon mission has been delayed until mid-October this year, but its eventual launch too will signal a new era of space exploration. It intends to land astronauts on the lunar surface.
“I think NASA does have some plans to explore Mars as well,” he says. “So if we can have the technology developed for the Moon, we could probably do that for Mars as well.”
Mars is the best contender for a planet near to Earth that could sustain human life, Kopparapu says.
“If there are enough protections for human survival on the Martian surface for habitats to be built up. I think that would be a good place for a human living area. The one thing I would say, that is that Mars is not Earth. First of all, the gravity is different - it’s lower gravity. So, one has to adapt to this lower gravity. If we can develop technologies for human survival, I think it is a good place to have some sort of a human presence.”
There already exists a machine to produce oxygen on Mars, but that would produce the equivalent that one tree would. However, exoplanets may offer better conditions.
“So far, we have found 5000 exoplanets, planets orbiting other stars,” Kapparapu says.
“Just to give you an idea, in our solar system we have eight planets around the Sun. And we now know more than 5000 around other stars. We are trying to find life on those planets. It could be any kind of life - it could be microbial life, or bacterial life, or even technological life as well. And this is an exciting time because we have so many of them out there and we are trying to build a telescope and observe them to see if any of them can are inhabited.”
He believes we are in a golden era of exploration and for the first time in human history we have the technology to find life on other planets.
Scientists are looking for “techno signatures”, which are like biosignatures or signatures of biology on a planet.
“Techno signatures are signatures of technology on a given planet, and there are various types of types of technological signatures we are looking at,” he says.
These could be ones similar to Earth, like industrial pollution, or city lights on the night side of the planet. Others may include radio signals emanating from the planet itself.
“If you want to imagine a technology that's even further ahead, centuries ahead of us, it's only limited by our own imagination. For example, they could build megastructures around the planet to harness the energy of the star, they could have big structures orbiting around the sun that we could detect by because they block the sun's light.”
The approach follows scientific principles and physical laws, builds a hypothesis and determines if it's possible to detect with existing technology or the technology of telescopes that would be able to be built in the future.”
He says there are some nearby potentially habitable planets that are good targets for scientists to study.
One of these is the nearest star to us is called Proxima Centauri.
“There is a planet in the habitable zone of that star - it's just four light years away, which means that if you shine a light towards that planet system, it will take four years to reach it. So that's one good candidate, and there are several nearby planet candidates that we are going to explore,” he says.
Water is one of the most critical and fundamental chemical elements that humans would really need to survive outside of Earth, which is what scientists also look for.
Scientists are also looking at 10 small stars nearest to Earth and exploring what types of gases these have in the atmospheres, made possible by the James Webb Space Telescope.
“I can't stress enough how exciting it is that, for the first time, we will be looking at the atmospheres of planets around other stars and find chemical elements that may show some kind of life signatures,” he says.
“When we look at these planets’ atmospheres, what we will look at are the chemical fingerprints of what kind of gases are there in the atmosphere. We wouldn't be able to directly see the planet itself because we don't have those kinds of powerful telescopes yet, but maybe we may have them in the next couple of decades.
"But as of this moment, we will be able to look at the chemical fingerprints, and identify what kind of chemicals are there, we can then compare them to our Earth's chemical fingerprints and see how close they are.”
The data collected from the telescope will be collected within the next couple of years, he says.