The University of Arizona's Wolfgang Fink has a different vision of what robot missions to other worlds should entail. His proposed tier-scalable reconnaissance involves sending a variety of different 'bots to work together instead of just one specialized lander. Here's his Tuscon Explorer II (or TEX II), which is designed to skim across alien bodies of water.

It's going to be a very, very long time before we have a telescope big enough to spot little green men waving at us from the surface of another world. What we might be able to spot in the near future, though, are their farms and gardens, with a spectral technique that looks for the signatures of alien plants in polarized light.

According to astronomer Zachory Berta, "GJ1214b is like no planet we know of." That's because a "huge fraction" of the planet is made up of water — a concept that's hard to drink in when one considers the fact that GJ1214b is a scant 1.3 million miles from its native star and boils at 450 ° Fahrenheit. It's unlike any other planet Hubble has spied to date.

Stop me if you've heard this before, but astronomers have used the Kepler planet huntin' space telescope to find the most (potentially) habitable alien planet yet.