The Yanxingzhe-1 rocket reached an apogee of 2.5 kilometers shortly after launch, descended, re-lit its engines and carried out an ocean soft-landing shortly after.

China successfully launches Tianwen-1 Mars probe The 480 m-wide object, which was discovered in 2013, has six dust tails and has characteristics of both asteroids and comets. Tianwen-2 will not land ...

China's ambitious Tianwen-2 mission represents a groundbreaking leap, becoming the first to visit both an asteroid and a comet in a single journey. Launched on 28 May, it will first rendezvous ...

On May 9, 2003, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched the first-ever asteroid sample return mission, Hayabusa. This was also the first mission to land on an asteroid. Hayabusa would ...

Japan’s first asteroid sample mission returned microscopic grains from asteroid Itokawa in 2010. It's second trip yielded about 5 grams — a teaspoon or so— from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020.

The historic attempt to sample the asteroid Bennu could provide clues to the origins of our solar system—and of life itself. Working like a reverse vacuum cleaner, the sampler head of the OSIRIS ...

The deserts of Utah are notorious for supposed alien visitations, but a real extraterrestrial emissary that parachuted to a soft landing there in September 2023 is proving more impactful. Onboard ...

A portion of the asteroid Bennu sample delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, set into a microscope slide at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Credit: Molly ...

Scientists from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission recently delivered remarkable findings about asteroid 101955 Bennu after the mission returned its samples to Earth in 2023. While ...

In September 2023, a capsule containing the pristine asteroid sample returned to Earth, landing in the Utah desert in the United States.