ALIENS ARE COMING: Chief NASA boffin in shock warning

First contact with alien life will happen very soon, claims NASA's Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan.

During a panel discussion regarding NASA's search for habitable worlds and alien life, Stofan said: "I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years."

Stofan would be the one to know, having held the most senior science position at NASA since August 2013.

"We know where to look. We know how to look," she told event attendees along with those watching via webcast. "In most cases we have the technology, and we're on a path to implementing it. And so I think we're definitely on the road."

The Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, John M. Grunsfeld, spoke in support of Stofan's suggestion that alien life would be discovered within "one generation", both in our own solar system and the galaxy beyond.

Within our own solar system, subsurface oceans beneath the icy crusts of Jupiter's moons Ganymede and Europa are considered to be viable locations for life, as is the internal water within Saturn's moon Enceladus, discovered in 2005 by the spacecraft Cassini.

It's widely contended that there once existed oceans of liquid water on the surface of Mars, and NASA's Curiosity rover has found organic molecules on the Martian surface which suggest life may have at one time been present on the planet.

NASA is scheduling its next Mars rover to launch in 2020, to search for signs of past life and cache samples for analysis if it's thought possible to return them to earth.

Alongside SpaceX, a US space transport services company, founded by Elon Musk with the intention of reducing space travel costs to enable the colonization of Mars, NASA is currently considering a "Red Dragon" mission in 2022 which could offer a low-cost way to achieve sample return.

While actual colonization seems a long time off, according to Stofan NASA aims to land astronauts on Mars in the 2030s, and return them to earth. Stofan believes human presence upon Mars is key to the search for alien life on the red planet.

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ALIENS ARE COMING: Chief NASA boffin in shock warning