Earth Climate Models Bring Exoplanet To Life

In a generic brick building on the northwestern edge of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center campus in Greenbelt, Maryland, thousands of computers packed in racks the size of vending machines hum in a deafening chorus of data crunching. Day and night, they spit out five quadrillion calculations per second. Known collectively as the Discover supercomputer, these machines are tasked with running sophisticated climate models to predict Earth’s future climate.
But now, they’re also sussing out something much farther away: whether any of the more than 4,000 curiously weird planets beyond our solar system — or exoplanets — discovered in the past two decades could have the ingredients necessary to support life.
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Music: "Machine Learning" by Jon Cotton and Ben Niblett; "No Wave" by Julien Vignon; "The Missing Star" by Matthew Charles Gilbert Davidson; all from Universal Production Music
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
LK Ward (USRA): Lead Producer
Claire Andreoli (NASA/GSFC): Lead Public Affairs Officer
Lonnie Shekhtman (ADNET): Lead Writer
Alex Kekesi (GST): Lead Visualizer
Anthony DelGenio (NASA/GSFC GISS): Lead Scientist
Avi Mandell (NASA/GSFC): Lead Scientist
Michael J. Way (NASA/GSFC GISS): Scientist
Chris Smith (USRA): Animator
Aaron E. Lepsch (ADNET): Technical Support
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