BEIJING, Mar 4 China is planning a new space mission in which the Tianwen-2 probe will collect samples from the small near-Earth asteroid 2016 HO3 and fly to the main belt comet 311P, it says in a message from the China Space Science and Technology Corporation (CASC).
The timing of the mission is not specified, while it is reported that it has already been officially approved and included in the program of space launches. On April 27-28 this year, scientists and payload developers will hold a special scientific conference in the city of Hefei dedicated to the upcoming Tianwen-2 mission.
The Chinese National Space Administration announced in April 2019 that it was preparing an ambitious mission to study a new quasi-satellite of the Earth — asteroid 2016 HO3 and comet 133P (Elst-Pizarro). During one launch, it is planned to fly around the asteroid, land on its surface, collect samples and transfer them to Earth in the return module. After taking off from the surface of the asteroid, the vehicle with the return module will approach the Earth as close as possible, the module will detach and head to Earth, and the vehicle itself will continue its journey, heading towards the asteroid belt, and will fly around comet 133P.
Earlier in April 2021, Alexander Zakharov, chief researcher at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, announced that Chinese colleagues had invited Russian colleagues to participate in the project with a scientific instrument. As a result, it was decided to install a device for studying the plasma environment on board the Chinese Zhenghe automatic station, which will fly to Elst-Pizarro.
In 2016, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced the discovery of a new quasi-satellite of the Earth — the asteroid 2016 HO3, which became a temporary companion of our planet about 100 years ago and will circle around it for several hundred more years. Asteroid 2016 HO3 suffers from «terraphobia» — it never approaches our planet closer than 38 distances from the Earth to the Moon. Comet 133P (Elst-Pizarro) is a prototypical main belt comet and an object in the Solar System that exhibits the characteristics of both a comet and an asteroid.
For research space probes of the Tianwen series, this will be the second mission. The first Chinese spacecraft «Tianwen-1» for Mars exploration, consisting of an orbital module, a landing capsule and a rover, was launched on July 23, 2020 from the Wenchang Cosmodrome on Hainan Island. On May 15, 2021, the Zhuzhong rover as part of the Tianwen-1 lander successfully soft-landed in the southern part of the Utopia Plain on the surface of Mars. The main goal of the mission is to find possible signs of life on Mars, as well as to help scientists understand whether the conditions on this planet can change in the future so that it becomes suitable for human life. China became the first country in the world to fly around Mars, land on it, and explore the Red Planet with a rover in one mission.