we welcome you all including experts in the field and doctor ellen stofan, would you begin. >> thank you. i am pleased to appear before the committee to discuss astrobiology and the search for life on earth that if i could have the first slide, please. nasa science missions are providing evidence of possible habitable environments beyond earth and with future technology and instruments underdevelopment we will ask what the solar system and beyond and could indeed, perhaps in at the last 10 to 20 years discover some form of life passer present. our search is making amazing progress. when i was a phd student, scientists suspected planets might be commonplace in the universe, but we had not found evidence. twenty years ago we found at the first evidence of such a planets and today thanks to nasa's space mission and ground-based telescope lab identified nearly 5000 planets orbiting other stars and we now believe that the fast majority of stars in the universe have planets around them. in july, the kepler mission confirmed that the first the earth sized planet in an inhabitable zone aroun