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Exploring Exoplanets

JPL's Search for New Worlds

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All Exoplanet Missions

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

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Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer

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Kepler Exoplanet Mission

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Spitzer Space Telescope

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Exoplanet Exploration at JPL

JPL is at the forefront of a burgeoning and fascinating endeavor — developing technologies to hunt for exoplanets, which are planets beyond our solar system.

Breakthroughs in the 1990s by the world science community confirmed that our Sun, the star at the center of our solar system, is not the only star that has planets in orbit around it. Since then, through extensive ground- and space-based observations, astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets. A significant proportion were identified by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, a mission launched in 2009, with development managed by JPL. The JPL-managed Spitzer Space Telescope helped piece together characteristics of some exoplanets, including headline-making discoveries about the TRAPPIST-1 system.

One of the ultimate questions scientists would like to answer eventually is whether any Earth-like exoplanets exist that could possibly harbor life.

Expanding Exoplanet Horizons

Finding an exoplanet against the overpowering glare of its parent star is extremely tricky—think of trying to find a firefly near a giant searchlight. JPL is testing and using several methods to overcome these daunting visual obstacles.

The Kepler Space Telescope successfully used the “transit method” to observe nearly three-quarters of a million stars, watching for the tiny dip in the brightness of an individual star when a planet passes in front of it. The net result: Kepler and its extended mission discovered about 2,800 now-confirmed exoplanets.

The infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, designed mainly to study galaxies and stars, demonstrated surprise prowess as an exoplanet hunter. Its discoveries included helping to confirm that a star named TRAPPIST-1 has seven Earth-size planets circling it, including three in the star’s “habitable zone.” Planets in the zone could potentially support liquid water, a key ingredient for life as we know it.

JPL is also developing technologies to block a star’s glare directly. One features a folding starshade, and the other has a high-tech instrument called a coronagraph to blot out the brightness. Work continues on a coronagraph as part of the Roman Space Telescope, a crucial technology demonstration for future space telescope missions to find and characterize Earth-like exoplanets around nearby stars.

Feature

Citizen Scientists Discover Dozens of New Cosmic Neighbors in NASA Data

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“We launched Kepler, to some extent, like Magellan or Columbus went to sea, not knowing quite what we were going to encounter. We knew we were going to make history. We just didn’t know what history we were going to make.”

-James Fanson, project manager for NASA's Kepler Mission when it was launched in 2009

NASA resource

Exoplanet Exploration

More About Exoplanets

News March 22, 2023 .

NASA’s Webb Spots Swirling, Gritty Clouds on Remote Planet

News Jan. 10, 2023 .

NASA’s TESS Discovers Planetary System’s Second Earth-Size World

News Jan. 10, 2023 .

NASA Wants You to Help Study Planets Around Other Stars

News Dec. 21, 2022 .

Assembly Begins on NASA’s Next Tool to Study Exoplanets

Mission Spotlight
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, formerly the Wide Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST), is a NASA observatory designed to settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets and infrared astrophysics.

Explore

News Dec. 15, 2022 .

Two Exoplanets May Be Mostly Water, NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer Find

Event Nov. 10, 2022 .

What’s in a Name? How We Find, Name, and Investigate Exoplanets

News Sept. 2, 2022 .

NASA’s Webb Takes Its First-Ever Direct Image of Distant World

News July 7, 2022 .

NASA Helps Decipher How Some Distant Planets Have Clouds of Sand

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