How nations worldwide are searching for life beyond Earth

In January 2026, UC Berkeley SETI@home researchers narrowed 12 billion candidate signals from the historical Arecibo archive down to 100 that still warrant follow-up. The archive was last collected before the telescope's December 2020 collapse, and the volunteer processing run ended its public distribution in March 2020. A month earlier, NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory program had awarded its first three-year industry contracts for the technologies that will, in the late 2030s or 2040s, try to do what the Berkeley team can only listen for: directly image a habitable planet around a nearby star and read its atmosphere for biosignatures.

No single agency runs the search. National space agencies, a handful of large private initiatives, and academic teams in at least a dozen countries share the work, and the methods they use are only loosely compatible. Radio dishes, infrared interferometers, ocean-world probes, deep-field space telescopes, and AI-driven archival searches all run in parallel, with different budgets, different time horizons, and different definitions of what counts as a credible detection.

USA: NASA, the ocean worlds, and the Habitable Worlds Observatory

For the United States, the long-running search is anchored at NASA and runs on three parallel tracks: ocean-world probes already in flight, the Mars Sample Return architecture, and the Habitable Worlds Observatory. The most visible of the in-flight missions is Europa Clipper, launched on 14 October 2024 on a Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center, which is now in cruise to Jupiter. Arrival is scheduled for April 2030, after which the spacecraft will execute 49 close flybys of the icy moon Europa with nine instruments operating simultaneously, looking for plumes, surface chemistry, and ice-shell dynamics consistent with a subsurface ocean. Project scientist Robert Pappalardo has called the mission "the first in-depth exploration of an ocean world." It is not a life-detection mission in the direct sense, but the data it returns will determine whether the next generation of ocean-world probes has a credible subsurface biosignature target to drill into.

The Mars Sample Return architecture has spent the better part of a decade redesigning itself after the 2023 independent review concluded that the original joint NASA-ESA plan was technically unworkable on the proposed budget. NASA is now pursuing a commercial-first architecture under Administrator Jared Isaacman, with new contract awards for the Mars Ascent Vehicle and the Capture, Containment, and Return System expected through 2025 and 2026. The scientific goal is unchanged: retrieve the cached Perseverance tubes and deliver them to a Mars-returned-sample receiving facility, where laboratories can look for biosignatures in the rock record with instruments too heavy to fly to Mars.

The Habitable Worlds Observatory is the most expensive track. HWO is the first NASA astrophysics flagship designed around a single astrobiology objective: identify and directly image 25 potentially habitable exoplanets, then use spectroscopy to look for chemical biosignatures in their atmospheres. The mission was named as the top strategic priority in the 2020 Decadal Survey in Astronomy and Astrophysics and currently sits downstream of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is expected to launch no later than May 2027. NASA set up the HWO Technology Maturation Project Office in August 2024 and on 5 January 2026 announced the first industry contracts — three-year fixed-price awards to Astroscale U.S., BAE Systems Space and Mission Systems, Busek, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Zecoat, working on deployable structures, coronagraph contrast, and ultra-stable segmented optics. A Mission Concept Review is scheduled for the end of the decade, after which the project either advances toward formulation or is cancelled. The cost ceiling in current planning is in the same order of magnitude as the James Webb Space Telescope.

Roman, which is on the runway to launch, will not image habitable worlds directly but will survey the galaxy for the smaller, brighter, and more numerous planets that HWO will then target. The two telescopes are designed to work as a stack: Roman finds the candidates, HWO characterises them. NASA's separate Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) and Network for Life Detection (NfoLD) research coordination networks, both now consolidated into the new cross-divisional astrobiology program office, knit the science teams together.

ESA: LIFE, JUICE, and the Voyage 2050 horizon

The European Space Agency's contribution to the search is currently less mature than NASA's but aims at a different part of the spectrum, and the agency is also the second-largest operator of in-flight ocean-world missions. ESA's JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer), launched in April 2023, is already in cruise to Jupiter and will arrive in 2031, where it will perform multiple flybys of Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto before becoming the first spacecraft ever to enter orbit around a moon other than Earth's. JUICE's radar and magnetometer instruments are designed to characterise the subsurface oceans of the three icy moons, and the Ganymede orbit phase will close with a targeted look at that moon's ice shell and internal ocean. ESA's ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover, a long-running joint project now restructured after Russia's withdrawal in 2022 with NASA providing the launch and heater units, is on track for a 2028 launch and will drill up to two metres into the Martian subsurface looking for preserved organic chemistry.

LIFE, the Large Interferometer For Exoplanets, is the top-priority large mission in the ESA Voyage 2050 senior committee report, published in 2021. LIFE is a space-based mid-infrared nulling interferometer, four collector spacecraft plus a beam-combining spacecraft flying in formation tens to hundreds of metres apart, designed to deliver thermal-emission spectra of dozens of temperate terrestrial exoplanets at 6–18.5 micrometres. Mid-infrared matters because methane and ozone, two of the strongest atmospheric biosignatures, are inaccessible to a visible-light telescope like HWO. A 2025 study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society modelled LIFE's detectability of the modern Earth, the Proterozoic Earth, and the Archaean Earth, and concluded that LIFE can detect ozone in most scenarios with a 2–3 sigma confidence, can pull methane out of the noise under low-UV conditions, and crucially can measure methane as a discriminator for the oxygen false-positive problem that affects visible-light spectroscopy. LIFE is engineered to characterise around 50 habitable-zone planets, and the 2025 paper makes the point that if those 50 show no Earth-like conditions, the inference against rare-Earth hypotheses sharpens considerably. A phase-A industrial study is under way, and the current launch target is in the mid-2040s.

ESA's nearer-term atmospheric contributors are the Ariel mission, scheduled for launch in 2029 and currently in qualification, which will survey the atmospheres of 1,000 known exoplanets statistically rather than case-by-case, and the Plato mission, scheduled for the mid-2020s, which will find rocky planets around Sun-like stars and characterise their host stars. None of these missions will image a habitable exoplanet; together with JUICE and ExoMars they are building the statistical and contextual scaffolding LIFE and HWO will rely on.

China: FAST and the SETI@home legacy

China's contribution to the search is led by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, located in a natural karst depression in Pingtang County, Guizhou, and operated by the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. FAST has been in scientific operation since January 2020 and is currently the only facility on Earth with the sensitivity to follow up the SETI@home candidate list. The Berkeley team has been pointing FAST at the coordinates of the 100 surviving candidate signals since July 2025, and FAST is expected to continue that follow-up through at least 2026. The signal-to-noise ratio is the deepest ever achieved for narrow-band technosignature work on a galactic field sample, even though the candidate list itself is essentially the cleaned-up archive of work that Arecibo finished in 2020 before its collapse.

China's own technosignature work is led by the FAST Key Science Project on Exoplanets and SETI, which in 2022 reported the first confirmed SETI narrow-band candidate from FAST observations, subsequently attributed to local radio-frequency interference. Separately, the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program has deployed a small ultraviolet telescope on the lunar far side in 2024 as part of the Chang'e-6 mission, intended to survey the galactic plane in a uniquely radio-quiet environment — a survey that has no SETI component as such but is part of the broader Chinese ground and space infrastructure that the SETI community shares access to. Tianwen-3, scheduled for 2028, is China's Mars Sample Return mission and a direct parallel to NASA's MSR architecture; if both succeed, the late 2030s will see two independent sample-returned Mars meteorite collections in terrestrial laboratories.

The 100 SETI@home candidates are not expected to be detections. The Berkeley team has been clear that most, possibly all, will turn out to be human-made interference, and the FAST follow-up so far has not produced any confirmed repeats. The value of the campaign is methodological: it sets the new sensitivity standard that future searches will be measured against.

Japan, India, and the smaller national programs

Japan's main contribution is in sample-return and the technical groundwork for in-situ resource use, both of which feed the biosignature-and-context track of the wider search. The Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission, scheduled for launch in 2026, will land on Phobos, collect surface samples, and return them to Earth in 2031. Phobos is widely thought to be a captured asteroid or a fragment of Mars ejected by a large impact, in which case the sample would give a cheaper and faster answer to the "is there preserved Martian organics" question than a full Mars sample return. Hayabusa2's 2020 return from asteroid Ryugu already produced organic-matter and pre-biotic-chemistry results published in 2022 and 2023, and the MMX science team is explicitly designed to look for similar signatures in Phobos regolith.

India's contribution is the Mars Orbiter Mission 2 (Mangalyaan-2), scheduled for launch in 2026, which will extend India's existing Mars atmospheric measurements with a focus on tracing methane and other trace gases, and Shukrayaan-1, a Venus orbiter also in 2026, which will characterise Venus's atmospheric chemistry with an eye to understanding why Earth and Venus diverged. Neither mission is explicitly framed as a life-detection mission, but both feed into the comparative-planetology work that underpins the search. ISRO is also a junior partner on a number of NASA and ESA missions and is developing its own small lunar-life-detection instrument for a future Chandrayaan lander.

The UAE's Hope Mars orbiter, in orbit since February 2021, completed its primary mission in 2023 and is now in an extended-mission phase studying the Martian exosphere, and the UAE Space Agency has signed the Artemis Accords and begun funding a small national astrobiology program through the Sharjah Academy for Astronomy, Space Sciences and Technology. Saudi Arabia's Neo City program and the Egyptian Space Agency's next-generation Earth-observation constellation are also relevant as regional partners, though neither is currently running a dedicated life-search payload.

The private search: Breakthrough Listen, SETI Institute, others

The private search is faster and more concentrated than the public one. Breakthrough Listen, the 10-year, $100 million program launched by Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking in 2015 and administered by the Berkeley SETI Research Center, is now in its final observational year. The program surveys one million nearby stars, the galactic plane, and 100 nearby galaxies, using the 100-metre Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the 64-metre Parkes Murriyang telescope in Australia, the MeerKAT array in South Africa, and the Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory. In October 2024, Listen signed a partnership with the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy, and in May 2025 it added a continuous all-sky radio monitor at the Westerbork Observatory in the Netherlands. The original 10-year funding commitment is set to conclude in 2026, and what comes after that is currently undecided.

Listen's most recent public milestones are the February 2026 announcement of the Breakthrough Listen Pulsar, an 8.19-millisecond pulsar candidate in the galactic-centre field, still under investigation, and the July 2025 follow-up of 3I/ATLAS, the third confirmed interstellar object after 1I/‘Oumuamua (2017) and 2I/Borisov (2019), which used the Allen Telescope Array, MeerKAT, Parkes, and Green Bank to look for technosignatures across the object's approach to its December 2025 closest pass and found none. The Exotica Catalog, released in 2025, lists 700 distinct observation targets spanning one example of every known object type in the universe, and the program's 2025 publication in The Astronomical Journal on the SETI@home data analysis provides the first peer-reviewed reduction of the volunteer-computed dataset that had previously only existed as a Berkeley technical report.

The SETI Institute, the older of the two large private programs, operates the Allen Telescope Array in northern California in partnership with SRI International. In 2025 the Institute announced a 600x speedup in Fast Radio Burst detection built on the ATA in collaboration with NVIDIA, a result that does not directly address technosignatures but has the same data-pipeline shape as a SETI search. The SETI Institute's astrobiology side, including the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, runs the technosignature, biosignature, and exoplanet programs that feed the ATA observations.

The single largest near-term threat to ground-based radio SETI is the rapid expansion of low-Earth orbit satellite mega-constellations. The Allen Telescope Array, the Green Bank Telescope, the SKA-Mid prototype array in South Africa, and the NenuFAR low-frequency array in France have all documented radio-frequency interference from Starlink and other constellations, and a 2025 SKA analysis found that 6,400 satellites would already cause a 70 per cent loss of sensitivity in the 10.7–12.7 GHz downlink band, with the entire band becoming unusable at the 100,000-satellite scale some operators have publicly outlined. The SETI Institute signed a coordination agreement with SpaceX in June 2025 to mitigate direct-to-cell signal saturation at the ATA — the first such arrangement between a SETI program and a commercial operator — and additional agreements are under negotiation with the U.S. National Science Foundation and the European SKA Observatory. The technical problem is tractable, but the policy negotiation is not, and the radio listening window is actively narrowing even as the optical listening window is opening.

Smaller but persistent private efforts include the Optical SETI programs at Harvard and Berkeley, which use photomultiplier arrays to look for nanosecond laser pulses from nearby stars; METI International, which both funds small transmitter experiments and pushes the active-SETI question into international forums; and the Planetary Society's solar-sail missions, which include the LightSail-2 2019 success and the ongoing Lightsail concept work that would, in principle, allow interstellar probes to be launched at a fraction of historic mission cost. The Drake Equation Workshops, run out of the SETI Institute since the 1970s, continue to set the de facto agenda for the field.

How the programs talk to each other

The headline finding of the most recent international coordination meeting, the 2025 COSPAR astrobiology panel, is that the public and private programs have begun to share telescope time on a level that would have been unusual a decade ago. The 100 SETI@home candidates are being followed up on FAST under a formal data-sharing agreement between the Berkeley SETI Research Center and the National Astronomical Observatories of China. Listen's expanded multi-telescope network is, in effect, a private international consortium. ESA's LIFE concept is being developed with German, Swiss, Dutch, and Belgian instrumentation partners. NASA's HWO has formal international participation in the technology maturation phase through the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, and the Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy white paper submitted to NASA in January 2026 was co-authored across 14 institutions in five countries.

Two structural frictions remain. First, the U.S. and China do not currently have a civil-space data-sharing agreement that would cover a coordinated biosignature archive, and the recent NASA HWO industry-contract list is restricted to U.S. firms, which limits international participation in the next flagship. Second, the international Outer Space Treaty's Article IX obligation to avoid "harmful contamination" is not, as of mid-2026, paired with an enforceable protocol for forward-contamination of Mars or ocean worlds, and the COSPAR Panel on Planetary Protection has not yet closed its 2023 review into whether the current Category IV requirements for Mars are too lax. Both frictions are on the table in 2026, and both are likely to come to a head before the next Mars launch window in 2028.

What 2025 and 2026 actually showed

The 2025–2026 null results, taken together, have tightened the empirical bounds on the search: the methods that produced them are sharper than the previous cycle's, and the next generation of instruments is funded and on the schedule that the current one earned. The radio listening window is narrowing under commercial pressure even as the optical window is opening.

The next decade will determine if the empirical bounds tightened by these null results give way to a confirmed detection, or if the silence holds.

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