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.
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.
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).
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