China’s Tianwen-2 Launches to Grab First ‘Living Fossil’ Asteroid Samples

China on Thursday launched a space probe on the country’s first mission to retrieve samples from an asteroid and bring them home for research, the Xinhua state news agency reported. Beijing has ploughed billions of dollars into its space programme in recent years in an effort to achieve what President Xi Jinping describes as the country’s “space dream”. It has built a space station orbiting the Earth and plans to run a crewed mission to the Moon this decade ahead of establishing a permanent base there. A Long March-3B rocket carrying the Tianwen-2 probe blasted off from the Xichang launch…