Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Space exploration will once again be featured on the big screen with this weeks release of the Paramount Pictures movie Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway.

In the film, a team of astronauts are charged with finding a new home for humanity after war, famine, plague and climate change wreak havoc on the Earth. In real life, however, NASA scientists, engineers and astronauts are working hard to make sure our home planet never meets such a fate, while also working hard to explore the universe around us, just in case we ever do need to find a new home out there amongst the stars.

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The cosmos beckons us to explore farther from home, expanding human presence deeper into the solar system and beyond. For thousands of years weve wondered if we could find another home among the stars. Were right on the cusp of answering that question, the US space agency explained in a statement released Friday.

If you step outside on a very dark night you may be lucky enough to see many of the 2,000 stars visible to the human eye, NASA added. Theyre but a fraction of the billions of stars in our galaxy and the innumerable galaxies surrounding us. Multiple NASA missions are helping us extend humanitys senses and capture starlight to help us better understand our place in the universe.

For example, the agency said that largely visible light telescopes such as Hubble have led scientists to learn that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and infrared missions (which include Spitzer, SOFIA and WISE) have allowed NASA personnel to analyze the stellar nurseries where new stars are formed from gases.

Furthermore, missions such as Chandra, Fermi and NuSTAR have made it possible to locate and witness the final moments of massive stars, which are capable of releasing enormous amounts of energy through supernovas and form black holes, and over the past few years new advances of technology (including the Kepler Space Telescope) have allowed researchers to fully understand just how many other planets there could be outside our solar system.

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Kepler, which is currently located from 64 million miles, examined a small region of a sky for a four-year period, measuring the change in brightness that occurred when planets passed in front of a star in its line of view. Based on those observations, the telescope was able to determine the likelihood that other planets orbit stars, and thanks to its findings, NASA was able to discover that it was possible that every star could have at least one planet.

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How NASA Research Is Preparing Mankind For An Potential Interstellar-Like Scenario