What does it take to catch up with a small, tumbling rock hundreds of thousands of kilometres from Earth? For China’s Tianwen-2 mission, the answer was a four hundred day chase covering roughly a billion kilometres of deep space, one that has just ended in success. The China National Space Administration has confirmed that the probe has rendezvoused with the near Earth asteroid Kamoʻoalewa, also known as 2016 HO3, closing to within about twenty kilometres and officially beginning its scientific exploration phase.

Tianwen-2 launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province back in May 2025, and the journey since has been a careful sequence of small corrections rather than one long straight line. Along the way, the spacecraft carried out deep space trajectory adjustments and mid course manoeuvres, gradually refining its path toward a target that, until recently, was known with surprisingly little precision.

A Long March 3B rocket lifts off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center, the same rocket and launch site that sent Tianwen-2 on its billion-kilometre journey (Credit : AAxanderr)

Ground based observations alone had only pinned down the asteroid’s position to within about a hundred kilometres, a comfortable margin from Earth but a serious problem when trying to actually meet something out there. The turning point came in early June, when Tianwen-2 first detected 2016 HO3 with its own instruments. A day later, at a distance of some thirty thousand kilometres, it performed a capture control manoeuvre, settling into coplanar flight alongside the asteroid, essentially matching its orbital path rather than simply crossing it. By 19 June, the gap had closed to two thousand kilometres, and the spacecraft continued tightening its approach from there.

Throughout this final stretch, Tianwen-2 captured its own optical imaging data of the asteroid, and mission engineers used it to dramatically sharpen their knowledge of exactly where 2016 HO3 sits in space, bringing the uncertainty down from that original hundred kilometre spread to something closer to a single kilometre. That refined positional data has already been made public through China’s Lunar and Planetary Data Release System.

Some scientists suspect Kamoʻoalewa may be a fragment blasted off the Moon by an ancient impact, making it, in effect, a tiny lost piece of Earth’s own satellite (Credit : Gregory H. Revera)

With the rendezvous complete, the real scientific work can now begin. Over the coming phase, Tianwen-2 will study the asteroid’s surface features, its material composition, and clues to what lies beneath that surface, building toward the mission’s ultimate goal of collecting a physical sample and eventually returning it to Earth.

Kamoʻoalewa is an intriguing target in its own right, a small companion that shares Earth’s orbital neighbourhood closely enough to be labelled a quasi satellite, and one some scientists suspect may even be a fragment blasted off the Moon long ago. Whatever Tianwen-2 finds in the months ahead, it will mark the next chapter in an increasingly crowded field of nations reaching out to touch, sample, and understand the small rocky wanderers of our Solar System.

Source : Tianwen-2 reaches asteroid Kamo’oalewa, starting scientific exploration after 1 bln kilometers journey (CNSA announcement)

In the spring of 2024, a Marine Corps legal assistance attorney called a Southern California towing company with a warning.

The company could not sell an active-duty service member’s car without first obtaining a court order, the attorney allegedly reminded the manager and owner of the company.

“We do this all the time,” the attorney claimed the owner responded.

That phone call was used as evidence in a federal lawsuit accusing S&K Towing Inc. of illegally auctioning or disposing of 148 vehicles of active-duty service members stationed at Camp Pendleton, a massive military base housing about 42,000 active-duty military members, over a five-year span beginning in August 2020. Some of the cars were towed while soldiers were serving overseas, the lawsuit alleges.

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors announced a settlement with the San Clemente-based company.

According to the settlement, the company agreed to pay about $160,000 to military personnel whose vehicles were towed by the company in violation of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, a federal law that provides financial and legal protections to active-duty military members and their families.

A spokesperson for the company did not immediately response to a request for comment. But in its response to the federal lawsuit, the company defended itself in court records, denying some of the allegations. The company said its contract with Camp Pendleton did not make any reference to the federal law.

“This defendant will admit that it’s best to abide by [state laws] when it came to enforcing its lien rights on vehicles where the registered owner was properly notified and failed to retrieve their vehicle,” court records read.

Prosecutors said the company plans to shut down but agreed that if it decided to reenter the business it would adopt policies and procedures that would comply with the federal law.

“Members of the U.S. Armed Forces have a legal right to be protected while they serve our nation overseas,” First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli said in a statement. “This settlement will provide compensation to impacted service members and serves as notice to all businesses to comply with federal laws that protect our military.”

“For far too long, tow companies have sold or disposed of servicemembers’ vehicles in violation of federal law,” Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in the statement. “This settlement sends a strong message that all towing companies must recognize servicemembers’ rights and take the necessary steps to comply with the SCRA.”

The settlement comes three months after federal prosecutors filed the lawsuit, accusing the company of illegally selling, auctioning or disposing of vehicles owned by SCRA-protected service members.

Prosecutors alleged in the court documents that the violations appear to date to the beginning of the company’s contract with the Marine Corps Police Department at Camp Pendleton. The contract stretched from August 2020 to April 2025, court records show.

The contract required that it comply with federal and state laws. As such, prosecutors said, the company was required to verify the owners’ military statuses before enforcing its liens by selling or disposing of towed vehicles. The company also didn’t obtain a court order before selling or auctioning the vehicles, the lawsuit alleges.

The company said in court records that it had hired a third-party company that specializes in verifying the registered owner and notifying them that the vehicle was impounded and subject to lien if the owner didn’t take action.

Federal prosecutors said since 2011, it has obtained more than $489 million in monetary relief for more than 152,000 service members whose rights were violated under the SCRA.