NASA has quietly launched one of the most massive undertakings in the history of science in order to understand one of our most profound questions: “Are we alone?” In recent decades, researchers have gotten very good at finding exoplanets in other solar systems, but the question of what makes a ‘habitable’ planet remains open.

Scientists, after all, are still trying to answer important questions about what makes this planet habitable and how life began here in the first place.

According to NASA’s exoplanet archive, there are currently more than 1800 confirmed exoplanets, with as many as 300 in the “habitable zone”. With new missions and technologies including the James Webb Space Telescope, coming online in the next few years that number will grow very rapidly.

Recent estimates show that there could be as many as 60 billion rocky planets in the habitable zones of their stars and scientists can’t focus on all of them.

The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) program will bring together scientists from across the United States, from a wide variety of disciplines, in working groups with specific goals to help answer important questions about what kind of planets might harbor life, as we know it.

Researchers working on NExSS will include astrophysicists, planetary scientists, Earth scientists, atmospheric scientists, biologists, chemists and others.

“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. The hunt for exoplanets is not only a priority for astronomers, it’s of keen interest to planetary and climate scientists as well,” said Jim Green, NASA’s Director of Planetary Science in a statement.

NASA researchers want to take a “system science” approach to astrobiology. This requires an understanding of how biological systems interact with planetary systems including a planets atmosphere, geology, oceans and interior. Researchers also need to better understand how the biological and planetary systems interact with and are affected by the planets host star.

“NExSS scientists will not only apply a systems science approach to existing exoplanet data, their work will provide a foundation for interpreting observations of exoplanets from future exoplanet missions such as TESS, JWST, and WFIRST,” said Dr. Paul Hertz, Director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA.

JWST is the James Webb Space Telescope. The successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is expected to launch in 2018. TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is scheduled to launch in 2017 and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is still being studied but should launch sometime in the 2020s.

The NExSS project will be led by Natalie Batalha of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Dawn Gelino with NExScI, the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, and Anthony del Genio of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The project will also include teams from the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, Hampton University, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory at the University of Washington, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, the University of Wyoming, Penn State University, the University of Maryland, the SETI Institute, Yale University, the University of Nebraska-Kearney and the University of California at Santa Cruz.

An additional five teams were chosen from the Planetary Science Division portion of the Exoplanets Research Program (ExRP). Each team from each university and institution will have its own set of goals and questions to pursue.

If everything goes well, by the time the James Webb Telescope starts sending back pictures of new planets, scientists will have a much better idea of what, exactly, they are looking for.