The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is actively involved in looking for life in space. The Origins Programme is a series of missions to study the formation of galaxies, stars and planets, and to search for life.
One of the recent breakthroughs in the search for extra-terrestrial life has been the discovery of planets around distant stars. So far almost 100 planets have been discovered in orbits around other stars, but none of these "exoplanets" remotely resembles Earth.
These planets identified so far are all very large because they are detected by the gravitational effects on the star that they orbit. They cannot sustain life and the search is on for earth-like planets which are more likely to harbour life.
Recent computer simulations have shown that there could be millions of Earth-like worlds scattered throughout the galaxy, just waiting for telescopes to improve sufficiently for us to find them.
The Terrestrial Planet Finder mission is designed to detect Earth-like planets and telltale chemical signatures of life. The mission aims to block light from stars to enable the much fainter orbiting planets to be seen.
This is a bit like looking for the light of a firefly near the beam of a brilliant searchlight! The light from these planets can be analysed by a spectrograph to look for chemicals suggestive of life.
NASA`s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is currently studying two proposals for this mission. They have been judged as sufficiently realistic to warrant further study in support of a launch of Terrestrial Planet Finder mission by the middle of the next decade.
Just as the Greeks were known for democracy, the Egyptians for pyramids, and the Romans for roads, our civilization may well be remembered for discovering life beyond our own planet, forever changing our perception of the Universe and our place within it.
Mr Caruana-Dingli is a surgeon with an interest in astronautics going back over 30 years.
Links:
Origins programme: http://origins.jpl.nasa.gov/
Terrestrial Planet Finder: http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/TPF/tpfindex.html