The Chinese mission will be financed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is currently finalizing its initial design phase. If they pass review by an expert panel in June, the mission team will receive funds to start building the satellite. The team plans to launch the spacecraft on a Long March rocket before the end of 2026.
For now, there is over 5,000 exoplanets discoveredfor the most part, due to the telescope Kepler from NASA. Some were rocky bodies similar to Earth and orbited small stars, although none fit the definition of an Earth 2.0.
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Chinese design aims to transport seven telescopes that will observe the sky for four years. Six of them will work together to study the constellations Cygnus-Lyrathe same portion of the sky that the Kepler telescope surveyed. “The Kepler field is ripe fruit, because we have very good data from there”said Jian Gean astronomer who leads the mission at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Academy of Sciences.
While the seventh instrument will be a gravitational microlensing telescope which will serve to survey rogue planets (celestial objects that roam freely and don’t orbit any stars) and exoplanets that are far from their Neptune-like star. It will point to the center of the Milky Waywhere a large number of stars are found. If launched successfully, it would be the first gravitational microlensing telescope to operate from space.
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Ge hopes to find one dozen planets from earth 2.0. And he plans to publish the data within a year or two of its collection: “There will be a lot of data, so we need all the hands we can get.” The team already has about 300 scientists and engineers, mostly from China, but Ge hopes more astronomers from around the world will join. “Earth 2.0 is an opportunity for a better international collaboration”he concluded.
Source: Ambito
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