A United States federal agency is not necessarily the first place you think of when it comes to answering some of the deepest existential questions for our species. Yet over the last half-century this is precisely where some of the greatest practical progress has been made. It is also where some of the deepest conceptual shifts about our cosmic status have had their genesis.
From Apollo 17′s archetypal view of the Earth as a ‘blue marble’, to vistas of the surface of Mars and the frigidly serene outskirts of our solar system, to the temperature noise of remnant microwaves from the young universe, and to a catalog of more than 4,000 candidate planets orbiting other stars. NASA’s been there, done that.
Of course, as a government agency NASA’s got its fair share of problems, from being bounced around as a political pawn to its own often creaky and Byzantine bureaucracy. But when it gets stuff right, it really is the right stuff.
So it’s very exciting that a big new effort has been announced to draw together the exoplanetary science community across the US. In full disclosure – I’ve known about this for several months now, and I’m directly involved as the institutional PI for Columbia University and the Columbia Astrobiology Center as part of a contributing team led by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and partnered with the Goddard Space Flight Center as well as some other institutions such as U. Washington, Weber State, and NASA Ames. Phew, and that kind of mouthful is precisely why the whole thing is being called NExSS (Nexus for Exoplanet System Science).
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