China's Tianwen-2 spacecraft has successfully rendezvoused with Kamo'oalewa, a small asteroid that trails Earth in a stable quasi-satellite orbit, capturing the first-ever close-up images of the object after a journey spanning roughly 620 million miles over 400 days in deep space.

The China National Space Administration announced the spacecraft's arrival on July 6, revealing that Tianwen-2 had captured its initial images from a distance of about 20 kilometers on July 2. The mission first optically detected Kamo'oalewa on June 6, followed by a capture maneuver on June 7 that brought the probe to within roughly 30,000 kilometers of the asteroid. By June 19, the spacecraft had closed the distance to about 2,000 kilometers before settling into its current station-keeping position closer to the surface.

Tianwen-2 launched May 29, 2025, from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center aboard a Long March 3B rocket, marking the first time that particular vehicle has delivered a payload directly onto an Earth-escape trajectory. The mission represents China's second interplanetary spacecraft, following Tianwen-1's successful landing of a rover on Mars in 2021, and its first attempt at collecting and returning a sample from a near-Earth asteroid.

The early images have already reshaped scientific understanding of the object itself. Ground-based observations had previously estimated Kamo'oalewa's diameter at somewhere between 40 and 100 meters, but Tianwen-2's close-up imagery suggests the asteroid is considerably smaller, at roughly 20 meters across, or a little over 66 feet, a size comparable to a school bus. That figure closely matches an estimate of 18 meters, plus or minus 2 meters, published in a preprint by University of Arizona........

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