China's Tianwen-2 aims to collect samples from asteroid Kamo'oalewa and return them to Earth A Chinese spacecraft on a mission to collect and return samples of a near-Earth asteroid beamed back its first image of its target. Called Kamo‘oalewa, the space rock loops by Earth, coming as close as 9 million miles and as far as 25 million miles from our planet. It's a quasi-satellite , meaning it orbits the sun, but it sticks close to Earth—astronomers have discovered eight of these space rocks.