China's Plan to Deflect an Asteroid by 2030

China's Plan to Deflect an Asteroid by 2030

By 2030, China is set to help redefine our planetary defense capabilities—launching a spacecraft to slam into an asteroid and push it off course. The target is a 30-meter rock called 2015 XF261. If successful, the mission will further demonstrate humanity can change the path of cosmic objects. This will give us all a better chance of protecting Earth from such threats in the future.

2015 XF261 is a near-Earth Aten asteroid with an estimated diameter of between 16 m (52 ft) and 69 m (226 ft). Its closest approach to Earth in the 21st century will occur on April 11, 2090, at a nominal distance of 0.00302 au (452,000 km). 2015 XF261 completes one orbit around the Sun every 360 days.

China's 2015 XF261Asteroid Mission
2015 XF261 is the target for an asteroid-deflecting mission planned by China in 2029, launching in 2027. The spacecraft is to be launched on a Long March 3B rocket in 2027, making a flyby of the planet Venus before arriving at the asteroid in early 2029, and colliding with it in April 2029 at an estimated speed of 10 km/s (6.2 mi/s).

China's asteroid mission will serve as an important follow-up to NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission (2021-2022) aimed at investigating and demonstrating a method of asteroid deflection by changing an asteroid’s motion in space through kinetic impact:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/dart/

Video Credit: CGTN
Duration: 2 minutes
Release Date: Sept. 7, 2025

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