China plans to launch an unmanned probe around 2025 to collect samples from a near-Earth asteroid and explore a comet.
The Long March 7 Y6 rocket, carrying the Tianzhou-5 cargo spacecraft, was launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in Hainan Province, China, on November 12, 2022. (Photo credit: THX/TTXVN)
In an exchange with the media, Zhang Rongqiao, the chief designer of China’s planetary exploration program and the Tianwen-2 mission, stated that the main goal of the Tianwen-2 mission is to launch a probe to the 2016 HO3 asteroid for sampling. The spacecraft will orbit and then land on the asteroid to collect samples. If successful, these will be the first samples collected by China from interplanetary space. After completing its mission, the spacecraft is expected to continue its journey to investigate a comet in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The 2016 HO3 asteroid, which is likely no larger than 100 meters in diameter, was first discovered by the Pan-STARRS asteroid survey telescope in Hawaii, USA, in April 2016. According to NASA, this asteroid orbits the Sun in an elliptical path that closely matches Earth’s orbit. 2016 HO3 also orbits Earth like a “quasi-satellite.”
In 2021, the Tianwen-1 unmanned spacecraft successfully landed on Mars, making China the second country to achieve a successful landing on this planet, after the United States.
In 2021, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft touched down on Bennu, an asteroid the size of a skyscraper located about 320 million kilometers from Earth. Previously, in 2019, a Japanese probe landed on Ryugu, an asteroid approximately 250 million kilometers from Earth.
