BEIJING: Chinese scientists are now trying to find another Earth-like planet outside the solar system.
The scientists are trying to find an alternative home for human beings, and conducive to human life.
Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have conceptualized Earth 2.0, and have already started working on the highly ambitious mission.
A planet that is in the habitable zone of its star in the Milky Way galaxy can be suitable to be marked as Easth 2.0, scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are hopeful.
The Chinese Earth 2.0 mission is likely to be launched in June.
The mission is likely to be supported by seven telescopes, which will scan the sky to find exo-planets. It is similar to NASA’s Kepler mission.
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“Our satellite can be 1015 times more powerful than Nasa’s Kepler telescope in its sky-surveying capacity,” Jian Ge, the lead astronomer on Earth 2.0, said.
Of the seven telescopes, six will study 1.2 million stars across a 500-square-degree patch of sky.
Earth 2.0 will be able to observe more distant stars than can be seen through NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which surveys bright stars near Earth.
The seventh instrument will be a gravitational micro-lensing telescope for observing free-roaming celestial objects that don’t orbit any star and exo-planets like Neptune that are far from their star.
The team of Chinese scientists hopes to find at least a dozen Earth 2.0 planets within a few years of its operations.