China has launched its Tianwen-2 spacecraft on a mission to collect samples from the near-Earth asteroid Kamo'oalewa, a unique body due to its small size and rapid spin. The mission aims to analyze whether the asteroid was once part of the Moon or escaped from the asteroid belt. With a scheduled arrival next year, the spacecraft will also make a final visit to a distant comet. This endeavor follows other countries' successes in collecting asteroid samples, contributing to our understanding of the solar system's formation.
By studying samples from Kamo'oalewa, researchers hope to determine whether it was once part of the Moon - and was chipped away during a collision event.
The asteroid basically hangs around Earth's vicinity, says Li Chunlai, a planetary scientist at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
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