David Kipping

It doesn't prove or disprove the existence of life either way, but it is our first characterization of the nature of those atmospheres.

Maybe we can even tell the pressure level and the temperature of those atmospheres.

So that's very exciting.

We are competing with that, and I think that science is completely mind-blowing and fantastic.

We have a completely different objective, which is, in our case, to try and look for the first evidence of these small moons around these planets, potentially even moons which could be habitable, of course, so I think it's a very exciting goal.

But attack has to make a human judgment, essentially, about which science are they most excited by, which one has the highest promise of return, the highest chance of return.

And so that's hard because if you look at a planetary atmosphere, well, you know most of the time the planet has an atmosphere already.

And so there's almost a guaranteed success that you're going to learn something about the atmosphere by pointing Jodi Ristea at it.

Whereas in our case, there's a harder sell.

We are looking for something that we do not know for sure exists yet or not.

And so we are pushing the telescope to do something which is inherently more risky.

I agree.

Life forms.

You don't have to convince me.

I mean, NASA has been on this quest for a long time and it's sometimes called Eater Earth.

It's the frequency of earth-like, usually they say planets,

the universe?

How common are planets similar to our Earth?

Ultimately, we'd like to know everything about these planets in terms of the amount of water they have, how much atmosphere they have, but for now it's kind of focused just on the size and the distance from the star, essentially.

How often do you get similar conditions to that?