The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have bolstered their efforts in searching for alien life through the help of the new Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) program.
NASA is setting up a research team consisting of Earth climate experts from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) who will create a model of the Earth's climate and use it to look for other planets in space that have a similar climate.
Other members of the team include Earth scientists, planetary scientists, heliophysicists, and astrophysicists.
The space agency will also make use of the Kepler space telescope which has already identified 1,000 exoplanets since its launch six years ago. Five of these newly discovered planets have similar sizes to Earth and are considered to be habitable.
"We have to start thinking about these things as more than planetary objects," Anthony Del Genio, a climate modeller from the GISS effort, said.
"All of a sudden, this has become a topic not just for astronomers, but for planetary scientists and now climate scientists."
NExSS researchers will follow a "system science" approach to their study in which each division of NASA will focus on a specific field of expertise.
The Earth scientists are tasked with studying data about the home planet; the planetary scientists will look into other worlds within the solar system; the heliophysicists will study how the Sun interacts with orbiting planets; and the astrophysicists will collect data on the various stars and outer planets that will be used for the structure of the systems science approach.
NASA hopes that scientists from these different disciplines would come together and share their research data and methodologies to achieve the NExSS's goal of finding life beyond Earth.
"This interdisciplinary endeavor connects top research teams and provides a synthesized approach in the search for planets with the greatest potential for signs of life," Jim Green, NASA's Director of Planetary Science, said.
"The hunt for exoplanets is not only a priority for astronomers, it's of keen interest to planetary and climate scientists as well."
Climate experts involved in the NExSS program will utilize 30 years' worth of research on the Earth's meteorology to create the climate models that will be compared to that of other planets.
NASA has allotted $10 million to $12 million as funding for the project.
The initial phases of the NExSS program are set to launch in 2017, while the rest are scheduled in 2020.
