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China’s ambitions and challenges for asteroid–comet exploration

Nature Astronomy volume 5, pages 730–731 (2021)Cite this article

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To the Editor — Rubble-piled and irregular-shaped small celestial bodies (SCBs) contain abundant pristine information about the early Solar System, providing a unique window into its origin and evolution. SCBs have also recently attracted interest beyond science due to applications in planetary defence, space mining, and the like. During the past three decades, nearly twenty probes explored SCBs with great success1,2, including the European Rosetta mission3, the Japanese Hayabusa 1 and 2 missions4, and the US OSIRIS-Rex mission5 to sample regolith for return or in situ analysis.

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Fig. 1: Overview of China’s asteroid–comet exploration mission.

NASA/JPL (asteroid image); NASA/JPL/University of Arizona (Jupiter image); NASA/Goddard/Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (Moon image); NASA/USGS (Mars image); NASA (Earth image).

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Acknowledgements

T.Z. is a China Scholarship Council Fellow and is grateful for the hospitality of the Department of Physical Intelligence in Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where part of this work was done. The work in this paper is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 51905105, 51635002, 51775011 and 91748201), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (grant number 2020A1515011262), the State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems (HIT) (grant number SKLRS-2020-KF12), and the Science and Technology Plan Project of Guangzhou (grant number 202102020364).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Tao Zhang, Kun Xu.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Beihang University, Beijing, China

    Tao Zhang, Kun Xu & Xilun Ding

  2. School of Electromechanical Engineering, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China

    Tao Zhang

  3. Department of Physical Intelligence, Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, Germany

    Tao Zhang

Authors
  1. Tao Zhang
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  2. Kun Xu
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  3. Xilun Ding
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Contributions

X.D., K.X. and T.Z. designed the framework. K.X. and T.Z. wrote the content and X.D. revised it.

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Correspondence to Xilun Ding.

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Zhang, T., Xu, K. & Ding, X. China’s ambitions and challenges for asteroid–comet exploration. Nat Astron 5, 730–731 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01418-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01418-9

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