Suvrath Mahadevan, Assistant Professor at Pennsylvania State University, says that there are many planets outside our solar system which may be able to support life as we know it.
Mahadevan’s research group was selected by NASA in March this year to build an advanced instrument named, NEID – short for NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler spectroscopy – for exoplanet search.
Born in Ahmedabad, Mahadevan finished from IIT Bombay before going to the US for his doctoral studies.
Mahadevan has said NEID will be completed in 2019 and installed on the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope in Arizona. The project received US $9.7 million in funding.
The official release from NASA mentions that the project will help confirm and characterize planets discovered from ongoing initiatives such as Kepler/K2 and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
(With inputs from Times of India.)
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)