JPL is at the forefront of a burgeoning and fascinating endeavor — developing technologies to hunt for exoplanets, which are planets beyond our solar system.Breakthroughs in the 1990s by the world science community confirmed that our Sun, the star at the center of our solar system, is not the only star that has planets in orbit around it. Since then, through extensive ground- and space-based observations, astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets. A significant proportion were identified by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, a mission launched in 2009, with development managed by JPL.
Exploring Exoplanets
