BEIJING – China on Thursday launched a space probe on the country’s first mission to retrieve samples from an asteroid and bring them home for research, the Xinhua state news agency reported.
Beijing has put billions of dollars into its space program in recent years in an effort to achieve what President Xi Jinping describes as the country’s “space dream.”
It has built a space station orbiting the Earth and plans to run a crewed mission to the Moon this decade ahead of establishing a permanent base there.
A Long March-3B rocket carrying the Tianwen-2 probe blasted off from the Xichang launch site in southwestern Sichuan province at 1:31 am.
About 18 minutes later, the Tianwen-2 probe was sent into a transfer orbit from Earth to the asteroid 2016HO3, the China National Space Administration said, according to Xinhua.
“The spacecraft unfolded its solar panels smoothly, and the CNSA declared the launch a success,” the news agency wrote.
Despite the mission’s long duration and significant risks, Shan “expressed his expectation of yielding groundbreaking discoveries and expanding humanity’s knowledge of the cosmos,” according to Xinhua.
Tianwen-2 is tasked with collecting samples from the near-Earth asteroid 2016HO3, and exploring the comet 311P, according to the country’s space agency.
Discovered by scientists in Hawaii in 2016, the asteroid is roughly 40 to 100 metres (130-330 feet) in diameter and orbits relatively close to Earth.
