A central component of NASA's science work is to help answer whether life has emerged elsewhere in the cosmos. So far, NASA has been looking tentatively in our own backyard — the solar system — for signs that Earth may be just one of many homes to life.
There are, however, a number of other stellar systems in the Milky Way with planets that life could call home, and NASA aims to search those planets for the markers of life with a concept mission called the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO).
