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China's Tianwen-2 Probe Reaches a Tiny Asteroid After a Billion-Kilometer Chase

China's Tianwen-2 spacecraft has arrived within 20 kilometers of the near-Earth asteroid Kamoʻoalewa after a journey of about one billion kilometers over roughly 400 days. The probe's first close-up images reveal the asteroid, one of Earth's tiny quasi-moons, is smaller than scientists expected, and the mission will now spend months studying it before attempting to collect a sample and return it to Earth by 2027.