When questioned about NASA’s search for alien life on Tuesday during a live webcast, NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan expressed her belief that the agency will discover alien life forms in the future.

“I think we’re going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we’re going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years.” She went on to clarify, “We know where to look. We know how to look, in most cases we have the technology, and we’re on a path to implementing it. And so I think we’re definitely on the road.”

Former astronaut John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, was quoted as supporting Stofan’s assessment. “I think we’re one generation away in our solar system, whether it’s on an icy moon or on Mars, and one generation [away] on a planet around a nearby star,” Grunsfeld said.

Grunsfeld, as well as most others in the scientific community, believe recent discoveries suggest that our solar system and the broader Milky Way galaxy are teeming with environments that could support life.

As NASA’s director of Astrophysics, Paul Hertz, explains, “just as the solar system is awash in water, so is the greater galaxy, allowing for near unimaginable amounts of potential life-bearing planets.” Hertz elaborates, “The Milky Way is a soggy place, we can see water in the interstellar clouds from which planetary systems and stellar systems form. We can see water in the disks of debris that are going to become planetary systems around other stars, and we can even see comets being dissipated in other solar systems as [their] star evaporates them.”

One of NASA’s main goals going into the next few decades is the discovery of alien life in our own solar system. To that end, NASA has launched various exploratory missions, most recently and most famously, the Curiosity Rover on planet Mars. The agency is planning on launching another Mars rover in the 2020s with much the same goal of the current Curiosity Rover, to search for signs of past life and cache samples for a possible return to Earth for analysis. NASA’s commitment to the discovery of alien life is best illustrated by another quote form Ellen Stofan, “”I’m a field geologist; I go out and break open rocks and look for fossils. Those are hard to find. So I have a bias that it’s eventually going to take humans on the surface of Mars — field geologists, astrobiologists, chemists — actually out there looking for that good evidence of life that we can bring back to Earth for all the scientists to argue about.”

FSA Connection Questions

1. In the article, the author uses quotes from which three experts?
2. In the piece, the word “exploratory” means what?
3. The author seems to offer what main idea?
4. Select the best two sentences in the story that support the idea of the possibility of discovering alien life in the next two decades.
5. What is the connotation of the word “life-bearing” in the story?