New space milestone: China sends mission to collect asteroid samples

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).