JAKARTA - China plans to launch a new mission to search for potentially habitable alien worlds, by launching a spacecraft.
The mission, called the Closeby Habitable Exoplanet Survey (CHES), will take ultra-precise measurements of the movement of stars and compare whether they are under the influence of gravitational pull.
If so, the stars most likely have exoplanets orbiting them. The mission can also provide estimates of the masses of exoplanets and the distances between them and their host stars.
It certainly could provide more information about whether these planets could host life. Not only China, other countries also have a similar mission.
For example, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia space telescope uses the same method to create a 3D map of the one billion stars in the Milky Way.
CHES will be much more focused than Gaia, which targets 100 stars similar to the Sun within a radius of 10 parsecs, or 33 light years from Earth.
"CHES will be a wonderful addition to exoplanet exploration," Elizabeth Tasker, a professor at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, told Space.
"While the number of potential targets is small, planetary mass measurements for worlds orbiting our neighboring K-, G- and F-type stars will be a valuable addition to our current data and a step towards identifying habitable worlds."
Even so, CHES won't be able to probe the planet's surface, but its mass can tell what its atmosphere is like.
"Higher-mass planets will have thicker atmospheres than Earth, trapping hydrogen and helium and making them more likely to become hotter. The range of light traveling through an exoplanet's atmosphere can be a key indicator of its composition," said Tasker.
CHES is not the only mission China has launched to explore the existence of alien life. China is also preparing for an Earth 2.0 mission to search for a habitable planet, with the plane launching in late 2026.
The Earth 2.0 satellite will have seven telescopes that will look into the depths of space over four years. Six of the telescopes will see the constellation Cygnus–Lyra, which the Kepler telescope has examined giving astronomers a good basis for investigating potential alien worlds.
The telescope on board will search for distant worlds by detecting changes in the brightness of stars, to indicate a planet has traveled in front of it.
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