Tootfinder

Alexander Venner,
currently studying at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy,
picked his way by hand through the data collected by a now-retired NASA space-based telescope called Kepler,
which was used to examine the sky for exoplanets during a survey of 500,000 stars that ended 8 years ago.
Datasets like these are huge, and often combed through with search algorithms,
but the PhD student managed what others did not by rolling up his sleeves, so to speak.

Citizen Scientist Spots Earth-like Planet: Now Astrophysicists Will Focus Most Powerful Telescopes on it
Alexander Venner picked his way by hand through the data collected by a now-retired NASA telescope called Kepler, which examined the sky for exoplanets

Mars - The Search Begins (1974): #Mars, including speculation on what form that life might take, many of the core ideas are still current 1/2 century on. The film was made just before NASA's Viking landers were launched in 1975 to begin the search but after the great success of the orbiter Mariner 9 - Olympus Mons was still called Nix Olympica and model makers believed that the sky over the Martian landscape was a deep blue.