China to launch asteroid-comet-exploration spacecraft soon

China recently made history by pulling off the first-ever landing on the far side of the moon and now the country wants to move a step ahead by exploring both an asteroid and a comet.

With the aim to expand its robotic space-exploration plans beyond the moon, China has planned a new mission three years from now and has invited collaborators to put their experiments on the probes for the mission, reported China’s news agency Xinhua.

The plan is still under discussion and requires a probe to visit and gather samples from the small, near-Earth asteroid 2016 HO3, also known as Kamo’oelewa. The probe will then fly back to the proximity of Earth where it will split into two and a return capsule will be released to bring the samples back to Earth.

After that, the probe will further continue its journey. With the assistance of the ‘gravity of Earth and Mars, it will finally arrive at the main asteroid belt and orbit the Comet 133P to explore it’, Xinhua quoted a China National Space Administration personal.

Comet 133P, also known as Elst-Pizarro, is an odd hybrid space rock known as ‘main-belt comet’ – an asteroid-belt body that has showed comet-like behavior in the past, explained Space.com

Moreover, the planned mission is likely to last for about 10 years and during that time, the craft will collect a variety of data that will further benefit scientists to better understand the two objects’ composition, orbit, structure, shape, rotation and size, among other traits. However, no timeline has been set for the mission yet.