It may sound far-fetched and beyond the grasp of reality, but it is true.  China is trying to look for a planet with Earth-like conditions, calling it Earth 2.0.

As per a report in the Nature journal, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has already conceptualised Earth 2.0, which is the name of the mission and is in its early stages of design.

The mission plan is to look for exoplanets that lie beyond our solar system, which can habitat living organisms.

Earth 2.0 mission is expected to be implemented in June while a team of experts reviews the plan. 

Once those plans are cleared, the development and funding phase of the mission will take place. This will lead to the building phase of the satellite.

China’s Earth 2.0 mission will be supported by seven telescopes, which will scan the sky in order to find exoplanets. This is quite similar to NASA’s Kepler Mission.

The Chinese telescopes will adopt a technique that tries to detect small changes in the brightness of the stars, which is indicative of a planet passing by it. Chinese scientists believe that using multiple small telescopes at once will provide a wider view than using a large telescope like the Kepler. The six telescopes in the Earth 2.0 mission will scan for 1.2 million stars at a much wider patch of the sky than Kepler could do.The telescopes for the Earth 2.0 mission will be aimed at observing the sky for four years. Out of these, six telescopes will survey the Cygnus-Lyra constellations.

“There will be a lot of data, so we need all the hands we can get. Earth 2.0 is an opportunity for better international collaboration,” said Jian Ge, the lead astronomer on Earth 2.0, in a statement.

Previous missions of finding exoplanets, mainly undertaken by NASA, led to the discovery of around 5,000 exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy.