China launches mission to retrieve samples from an asteroid

29/5/2025 6:07

China on Wednesday

embarked on its first mission to retrieve samples from a nearby

asteroid with the nighttime launch of its Tianwen-2 spacecraft,

a robotic probe that could make the fast-growing space power the

third nation to fetch pristine asteroid rocks.



China's Long March 3B rocket lifted off around 1:31 a.m.

local time from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center carrying the

Tianwen-2 spacecraft, which over the next year will approach the

small near-Earth asteroid named 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, some 10

million miles away.



Chinese state media Xinhua confirmed the launch of Tianwen-2

and dubbed it a "complete success."



Tianwen-2 is scheduled to arrive at the asteroid in July

2026 and shoot a capsule packed with rocks back to Earth for a

landing in November 2027.



The mission is the latest example of China's swiftly

expanding space programs, a streak of cosmic achievements in

recent years that includes landing robots on the far side of the

moon, running its own national space station in orbit and

investing heavily in plans to send humans to the lunar surface

by 2030.



Japan's Hayabusa that fetched samples from a small asteroid

in 2010 marked the world's first such mission. Japan did it

again in 2019 with its Ryugu mission, followed by the first U.S.

asteroid retrieval mission, OSIRIS-REx, that brought back

samples from the Bennu asteroid in 2020.



Kamoʻoalewa, the target asteroid for Tianwen-2, is known as

a quasi-satellite of Earth, a close celestial neighbor that has

orbited the sun for roughly a century, according to NASA. Its

size is anywhere between 120 feet (40 meters) and 300 feet (100

meters).