NASA announces new discovery from spacecraft to hunt for life

NASA will share the latest discovery from a hunter capable of containing life.

The US Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will hold a press conference at 1 am on December 15, Vietnam time to announce a new discovery from the planet-searching space telescope that can contain Kepler's , according to Space.com.

"This finding is the result of the researchers' use of Google. Machine learning is an artificial intelligence approach and demonstrates a new way of analyzing Kepler's data , " NASA said.

The latest discovery from NASA's space telescope is the result of analysis using machine learning technology.(Photo: NASA).

Experts attending the press conference include: Paul Hertz, director of Astrophysics at NASA headquarters in Washington; Christopher Shallue, senior software engineer at Google AI in Mountain View, California; Andrew Vanderburg, astronomer and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas, Austin; Jessie Dotson, Kepler project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.

Kepler discovered extrasolar planets by tracking the light blur when the planet passed in front of the host star. This is the most popular planet hunting device in history. The spacecraft has found more than 2,500 officially recognized planets, accounting for about 70% of known planets, along with the number of equally large planet "candidates" awaiting confirmation after analysis.

Most of these findings came from Kepler's observations in the first mission that lasted from 2009 to 2013. Scientists are still studying data sets. Over the past few years, they used innovative analytical techniques to detect many exoplanets in the data Kepler had collected five years ago.

The first mission focused on continuous observation of about 150,000 Kepler stars ending in May 2013, when the spacecraft lost its second navigational flywheel. But control experts quickly found a way to keep Kepler balanced by sunlight pressure. Currently the ship is carrying out a second mission called K2 to search for more exoplanets and conduct some other observations.