China Plans Mission To Discover Earth 2.0 Beyond The Solar System

BEIJING: China has been currently planning to discover a habitable exoplanet beyond the solar system i.e. Earth 2.0 which is said to have an environment like earth.

Funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences Earth 2.0 mission aims to launch the spacecraft on a Long March rocket before the year 2026.

China is planning to find the said planet, after it had sent robots to the Moon, landed rovers on Mars and built its own space station.

It is said that Earth 2.0 which is outside the Solar System in other parts of the Milky Way is one such planet where survival is possible with the right conditions for liquid water available on it.

According to reports, the proposed mission will be reviewed by the experts in June this year and at present, it is in the design phase.

After the mission, the astronomers can get a good collection of exoplanet samples for future research work said, experts.

The mission team after the review will start building a satellite with 7 telescopes that will keep a watch on the sky for 4 years till 2026. Among the seven, 6 will study the Cygnus Lyra constellations, earlier observed by the Kepler telescope for nine years.

The astronomer leading the Earth 2.0 at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jian Ge said that the Kepler field is low-hanging fruit as good data is received from there.

The 6 telescopes of Earth 2.0 will observe about 1.2 million starts across a 500 sq degree patch of sky and it is notably five times wider than the Kepler's view.

Ge asserted that if the telescope is launched successfully, it will be the first-ever gravitational microlensing telescope to operate from space.

The astronomer said that the satellite that will be made for Earth 2.0 mission would be 10 to 15 times more powerful than the NASA's Kepler telescope. It can significantly conduct a census that can identify exoplanets of varied sizes, ages and masses.

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