Tootfinder

Bizarrely European amateur radio tracking with the big dishes in Dwingeloo and Bochum - #Tianwen2 has reached its target asteroid (469219) Kamoʻoalewa: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-tianwen-2-spacecraft-arrives-at-one-of-earths-mysterious-quasi-moons/. Bochum also reports that the data rate has gone up: https://bsky.app/profile/amsat-dl.org/post/3mnxqa7bshk2s

It looks like China's #Tianwen2 will reach asteroid (469219) today to begins its sample return mission - this follows from radio tracking by amateurs in Dwingeloo and Bochum: https://bsky.app/profile/radiotelescoop.bsky.social/post/3mn5aqlk3222l and https://x.com/amsatdl/status/2061787339936973154. And radio hams are also decoding the telemetry: https://destevez.net/2026/05/an-update-about-tianwen-2-telemetry/. While the paper "Tianwen-2 mission target asteroid (469219) Kamoʻoalewa probably develops an Itokawa-compositional but more space-weathered surface" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-73284-w - calls the proposed origin of the asteroid from the Moon into question.

This is the *other* #asteroid visited by an Asian spacecraft this month: tiny (469219) Kamo`oalewa - the bar measures 10 meters - as seen by China's #Tianwen2 from 20 km distance ahead of a #SampleReturnMission: https://www.facebook.com/Spacewalk2021/posts/pfbid02JKYdMnWPGRxxShDj6U6d6M2vs5qUkVL55v97CBgAHJ6KTnCvM6TkSTyDVEFGqk23l (see also the paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24017 about JWST observations of the asteroid).