China plans to send probe to near-Earth asteroid around 2025
China plans to launch an uncrewed probe around 2025 to collect samples from a near-Earth asteroid and explore a comet, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Monday, citing a senior space expert.
The chief goal of the Tianwen-2 mission is to send a probe to the asteroid 2016HO3 to retrieve samples, said Zhang Rongqiao, chief designer of China's planetary exploration program and of the Tianwen-2 mission.
"If successful, it would be China's first samples collected from interplanetary space," Zhang said, adding that a spacecraft will be sent to fly around and then land on the asteroid to collect the samples.
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After completing the task, the spacecraft is expected to continue its journey to explore a comet in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Zhang said.
2016HO3 - likely no larger than 100 metres (300 feet) across - was first spotted by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope in Hawaii in April 2016.
The asteroid orbits around the sun on an elliptical path that also approximates the Earth's. It also circles around Earth like a "quasi-satellite", according to NASA.
China's uncrewed Tianwen-1 spacecraft landed on Mars in 2021, making China the second space-faring nation after the United States to land on the planet.
China would not be the first nation to land on an asteroid.
In 2021, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft landed on Bennu, a skyscraper-sized asteroid some 320 million km (200 million miles) from Earth.
A Japanese probe landed on Ryugu, an asteroid 250 million km from Earth, in 2019.
