Direction: Consider text II to answer questions 05 to 09.

TEXT II

Is There Life On Other Planets?

The ultimate goal of NASA's exoplanet program is to find

unmistakable signs of current life on a planet beyond Earth.

How soon that can happen depends on two unknowns: the

prevalence of life in the galaxy and how lucky we get as we

5 take those first, tentative, exploratory steps.

Our early planet finding missions, such as NASA’s Kepler

and its extended incarnation, K2, or the James Webb Space

Telescope, could yield bare bones evidence of the

potentially habitable worlds. James Webb, designed in part

10 to investigate gas giants and super-Earths, might find an

outsized version of our planet. NASA's Nancy Grace Roman

Space Telescope or the Wide-Field Infrared Survey

Telescope, could zero in on a distant planet’s reflected light

to detect the signatures of oxygen, water vapor, or some

15 other powerful indication of possible life.

But unless we get lucky, the search for signs of life could

take decades. Discovering another blue-white marble hidden

in the star field, like a sand grain on the beach, will probably

require an even larger imaging telescope. Designs are

20 already underway for that next-generation planet finder, to

be sent aloft in the 2030s or 2040s.

MIT physics professor Sara Seager looks for possible

chemical combinations that could signal the presence of

alien life. She and her biochemistry colleagues first focused

25 on the six main elements associated with life on Earth:

carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, sulfur and

hydrogen.

“We’re going to have so few planets, we have to get lucky,”

Seager said. “I don’t want to miss anything. I don’t want to

30 miss it because we weren’t smart enough to think of some

molecule.”

Adapted from: NASA. Is There Life On Other Planets? Available on: https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/is-there-life-on-other-planets. Accessed on: February 25th, 2025.

Glossary:

1. exoplanet: a planet of a star that is outside the solar system.

2. prevalence: the fact that something is very common or happens often.

3. NASA’s Kepler: space telescope designed to survey a portion of the Milky Way galaxy.

4. loft: in the air or in a higher position.

5. MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.