China's Ambitious Space Exploration Plans: From Moon Colonization to Hunting for Earth-like Planets.

China's Miyin project aims to construct an array of telescopes in deep space to search for habitable planets orbiting other stars. The project envisions sending four light-collecting telescopes and a beam combiner to Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2. The spacecraft will use interferometric techniques to provide high angular resolution mid-infrared observations to directly image and characterize exoplanets around stars up to 65 light-years away. The project is still in the development phase, but current plans map out on-orbit technology demonstrations in 2024, followed by interferometry experiments conducted aboard the Tiangong space station a year later.