The China National Space Administration announced on Monday that the Chinese probe "Tianwen-2" has successfully reached a distance of 20 kilometers from the asteroid "2016 HO3", enabling it to begin scientific exploration after a journey of around 400 days and about one billion kilometers.

The objectives of Tianwen-2's mission

China launched its first mission to return samples from asteroids, known as the "Tianwen-2" mission, on May 29, 2025, in an effort to achieve multiple objectives over a ten-year exploratory journey: collect samples from the near-Earth asteroid "2016 HO3" and explore the main belt of comet "311P", which is beyond Mars, according to the Chinese news agency Xinhua.

According to the administration, during the approach phase, the probe obtained images of the asteroid, enabling the mission team to benefit from visual navigation data collected during the close approach process to improve the asteroid's ephemeris, reducing the positional uncertainty previously determined through ground observations only, from hundreds of kilometers to a scale of kilometers.

What we know about Tianwen-2's journey

During its journey to the asteroid, the probe performed deep space maneuvers and path corrections. On June 6, 2026, it made the first discovery of the mentioned asteroid. On June 7, it entered a common orbital plane with the asteroid over 30,000 kilometers, while on June 19, it approached the asteroid to within 2,000 kilometers.

The agency said that the probe will gradually conduct more detailed scientific explorations to collect data on the morphology of the asteroid, its physical composition and internal structure, laying the foundation for subsequent sample collection operations.