Chinese space telescope team hopes to join race to find Earth-like planets – and maybe signs of life
- Researchers have completed concept study for Habitats, which could come with a price tag of more than US$1.48 billion
- They have proposed a system using three mirrors to examine the atmosphere of nearby planets with unprecedented precision
If selected to enter the design phase, the HABItable Terrestrial planetary ATmospheric Surveyor – or Habitats – will join the global race to find a twin of planet Earth.
With a potential price tag of over 10 billion yuan (US$1.48 billion), it will also be the most ambitious and expensive space science project China has ever funded.
Thanks to telescopes such as Kepler and TESS surveying the sky for planets outside the solar system, humanity has discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets and edged ever closer to answering the question “are we alone in the universe?”
But the details of those exoplanets remain extremely difficult to observe as their parent star often outshines them by billions of times in a sun-Earth-like system.
A powerful space telescope like the James Webb can detect water molecules in an exoplanet’s atmosphere with the precision of about 100 parts per million (ppm).