China is planning its first space mission to survey the skies for Earth-like exoplanets
China is planning its first space mission to survey the skies for exoplanets similar to Kepler-186f, an Earth-size planet orbiting a distant star .After sending robots to the Moon, landing them on Mars and building its own space station, China is now eyeing distant solar systems. This month, scientists will release detailed plans for the country’s first mission to discover exoplanets.
With current technology and telescopes, it is extremely hard to find the signal of small, Earth-like planets when their host stars are one million times heavier and one billion times brighter, says Jessie Christiansen, an astrophysicist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
“Our satellite can be 10–15 times more powerful than NASA’s Kepler telescope in its sky-surveying capacity,” says Ge. But four years into the Kepler mission, parts of the instrument failed, rendering the telescope unable to stare at one patch of the sky over an extended period of time. Kepler was on the cusp of finding some truly Earth-like planets, says Huang, who has worked with the Earth 2.0 team as a data-simulation consultant.
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