China has launched its first-ever mission to retrieve samples from an asteroid, marking another major milestone in its ambitious space program. The Tianwen-2 spacecraft took off early Thursday aboard a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, aiming to collect rocks from the near-Earth asteroid Kamoʻoalewa.
This decade-long mission will see the spacecraft reach the asteroid in July 2026 and return a sample capsule to Earth by November 2027. If successful, China will become the third country to achieve this feat, following Japan and the United States.
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The challenge is steep—Kamoʻoalewa’s weak gravity makes landing and sampling much more difficult than past lunar missions. After this phase, Tianwen-2 will continue its journey to explore comet 311P/PanSTARRS in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
This mission highlights China’s fast-growing role in space exploration, with future plans to retrieve Mars samples by 2030 already underway.
