China's Tianwen-2 space probe has reached its target, the near-Earth asteroid Kamo'oalewa, after a journey of about 400 days, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said on Monday.
The mission, which was launched in May 2025, is an important milestone for China as it tries to match or overtake the US and Europe in deep-space exploration and is the first Chinese attempt to collect samples from an asteroid.
Scientists believe that samples taken from asteroids — rocky bodies orbiting the sun — could give clues about how the solar system came into being and evolved.
What do we know about the Tianwen-2 mission and the asteroid?
The CNSA said the Tianwen-2 had successfully arrived at a distance of 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the asteroid — also named 2016 HO3 — which measures just a few dozen meters (yards) in diameter.
