space
On June 7, 2026, a Chinese spacecraft that had been silently cruising for 13 months fired its engine to settle into orbit just 20 kilometers from a small quasi-moon that shadows Earth, ahead of an attempt to collect a sample from its surface.
Tianwen-2 is China's asteroid sample-return mission, targeting the quasi-moon Kamo'oalewa, an object some scientists suspect is a fragment blasted off the Moon by an ancient impact. After roughly thirteen months of cruising, the spacecraft fired its engine to settle into orbit 20 kilometers away, ahead of collecting a surface sample.
Chang'e-6 focuses on returning samples from the Moon itself, and Hayabusa2 is a Japanese mission that already returned asteroid samples in an earlier decade, neither matches this mission.
Independent European radio trackers confirmed the orbit-insertion maneuver since China had not published its own tracking data, showing how trackers worldwide keep watch even when official updates lag.
space
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