After China sent robots to the moon, landed others on Mars, and built its own space station, it is now setting its sights on distant solar systems. This month, scientists will publish detailed plans for the first mission that China will organize to discover planets outside our solar system.
The mission will search for these planets in other regions of the Milky Way, with the aim of finding the first Earth-like planet orbiting in the habitable zone around a star similar to the sun; Astronomers believe that such a planet, which they call “Earth 2.0”, will have the right conditions for the existence of liquid water, and possibly life forms.
And 5,000 planets have already been discovered outside our solar system in the Milky Way, most of them by the Kepler telescope of NASA, which worked for nine years before it ran out of fuel in 2018, and some of the discovered planets were rocky bodies similar to Earth. , orbiting small red dwarf stars, but not all of them meet the definition of “Earth 2.0”.
With current technologies and telescopes, it is very difficult to spot indications of the existence of small Earth-like planets, when their host stars are a million times heavier and a billion times brighter, says Jesse Christiansen, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Institute of Exoplanet Sciences.
However, the Chinese mission called “Earth 2.0”, hopes to change that situation, and this mission will be funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and it is currently at the end of the initial design stage, and the designs are scheduled to be reviewed by a committee of experts in June, and if approved, the mission team will receive funding. To begin building the satellite, the team plans to launch the spacecraft on a Long March rocket before the end of 2026.
The satellite of the “Earth 2.0” mission is designed to carry 7 telescopes, and these telescopes will monitor the sky for four years. “The scope of the Kepler telescope is easy to scan,” says Jian Jie, an astronomer who leads the expedition at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Because we have very good data on this region.”
The mission’s telescopes will monitor 1.2 million stars in a 500-square-degree patch of sky. ground.
(Nature)