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NASA Defines Gaps In Exoplanet Science

Science is driven by our desire to understand things. In some cases, where it requires significant effort and investment to develop systems that can understand new things, science benefits from a game plan that the community of researchers focused on a particular niche can rally around, even if they don’t necessarily agree on the details. In astronomy and space science, those game plans typically take the form of Decadal Surveys, produced by the National Academies to define the path forward in a specialization or sub-field. However, there are almost always follow-up reports that break down the suggestions from the Decadal Surveys into actionable plans that experts in the field then spend the next ten years executing on. One of those “tactical” plans was recently released on arXiv by the two lead scientists of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP), though it was listed as Rev H and released at least internally back in January 2025. In it, Drs. Karl Stapelfeldt and Eric Mamajek lay out 17 scientific goals that ExEP plans to work on over the next 3-5 years.

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