Considered a leader in the search for planets outside our solar system, Alan Boss says we are at a turning point in our search for extraterrestrial life. He expects we are on the verge of finding many different Earth-like planets across the universe, and he expects it will be common to find life on those planets. [...]

What NASA calls its ‘Heliophysics Observatory’ is an impressive fleet of spacecraft designed (often with international partnership) to study the relationship between the Sun, Earth, and Solar System. Flying in an array of trajectories and orbits, many of these satellites do not take images in the conventional sense but record fields, particle energies and fluxes [...]