Sarah Al-Ahmed:
Around what time should we expect these pictures to start flowing in?
Andrew Jones:
June 7 was what we expected to be the rendezvous with Kamo’oalewa. The China National Space Administration hasn’t officially confirmed that this rendezvous maneuver has taken place, but AMSAT-DL, which is a nonprofit, used their telescopes in Bochum in Germany, and Dwingeloo in the Netherlands, and they pretty much confirmed that this maneuver took place. It seems that everything went well.
Looking at the mission papers that have been put out there, what I’m expecting is that the spacecraft is about 2,000 kilometers out from the asteroid at the moment, and that over the next few weeks, it’s going to begin its approach to the asteroid. It’s going to move from a couple of thousand kilometers out down to around about 20 kilometers.
Hopefully then around July 4, we get the confirmation that, “Yes, Tianwen-2 is in its desired orbit, here’s an image.”
From there, they’re going to spend until April 2027 mapping the asteroid using LiDAR, cameras, and sounding radar. They’re going to find out as much as they can about the surface, about the topography, and try to find some landing points for sampling using three different sampling techniques — well, at least two. And then, if possible, they’ll try to anchor and attach to the asteroid depending on what the surface turns out to be.
All being well, they will depart from the asteroid on the 24th of April 2027, which also happens to be China’s National Space Day. So in a year and a half, the reentry capsules should come through the atmosphere and land safely. And then we’ll have a fourth set of samples from an asteroid.