Using multiple small telescopes together gives scientists a wider field of view than a single, large telescope such as Kepler. The telescopes will look for exoplanets by detecting small changes in a star’s brightness that indicate that a planet has passed in front of it. “The Kepler field is a low-hanging fruit, because we have very good data from there,” says Jian Ge, the astronomer leading the Earth 2.0 mission at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Six of the telescopes will work together to survey the Cygnus–Lyra constellations, the same patch of sky that the Kepler telescope scoured. The Earth 2.0 satellite is designed to carry seven telescopes that will observe the sky for four years. The team plans to launch the spacecraft on a Long March rocket before the end of 2026. If the designs pass a review by a panel of experts in June, the mission team will receive funding to start building the satellite. It will be funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is wrapping up its early design phase. The Chinese mission, called Earth 2.0, hopes to change that. 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. Some of the planets were rocky Earth-like bodies orbiting small red-dwarf stars, but none fit the definition of an Earth 2.0. More than 5,000 exoplanets have already been discovered in the Milky Way, mostly with NASA’s Kepler telescope, which was in use for 9 years before it ran out of fuel in 2018. Astronomers think such a planet, called an Earth 2.0, would have the right conditions for liquid water - and possibly life - to exist. The mission will aim to survey planets outside the Solar System in other parts of the Milky Way, with the goal of finding the first Earth-like planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a star just like the Sun. This month, scientists will release detailed plans for the country’s first mission to discover exoplanets. PyleĪfter sending robots to the Moon, landing them on Mars and building its own space station, China is now eyeing distant solar systems. Experiences gained with this first ever space astrometry mission are considered in relation to a follow up mission for Hipparcos.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 (artist’s impression). The data quality verifications are reviewed and guidelines to the proper use of the Hipparcos data are provided, followed by some of the first scientific results of the mission. Astrometric and photometric data for a selection of 48 minor planets, the Jovian moon Europa and the Saturnian moons Titan and Iapetus were also obtained. The Hipparcos mission was complemented by the Tycho experiment, providing a complete all-sky survey of astrometric and photometric parameters for one million stars down to magnitude 11, though with lower accuracies than obtained for the main mission. This has led to the discovery of thousands of variable stars. The mission results comprise not only outstanding astrometric data on both single and double stars, but also an unique all-sky photometric survey which has been used for variability investigations. Data files presented in the catalogues are described in the context of the data reductions, and explained in content and usage. This is followed by a description of the input data streams and a summary of the data reductions. It presents a brief review of the satellite, the aims of the mission with their relation to ground-based astrometry, and the mission history. The emphasis is on those aspects that have or may have influenced the data as presented in the catalogues. A review is presented of the European Space Agency's astrometric satellite project Hipparcos, for which the final data catalogues were published in June 1997.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |