This week, astronomers are seeing double. Just a day after Japan’s spacecraft flew by a strange, two-lobed asteroid named Torifune, China’s space agency announced that its own robotic envoy had arrived at another space rock — an angular, compact object named 469219 Kamoʻoalewa.

China’s spacecraft, Tianwen-2, has been hunting down its target — a so-called quasi-moon — ever since it launched from Earth in May 2025. Finally, after a 400-day voyage around the solar system, it got within 12 and a half miles of the asteroid’s surface, allowing the spacecraft to take its first detailed photograph.

Pointy, asymmetric and just 60 feet in length, Kamoʻoalewa looks very different from the far more rubbly and rotund asteroids that various uncrewed spacecraft have visited in recent years.

“Kamo‘oalewa looks amazing, like nothing we’ve seen floating in space before,” said Sabina Raducan, a researcher at the International Space Science Institute in Bern, Switzerland.

Its craggy, diminutive nature suggests a dramatic origin story — perhaps a high-speed collision between two large asteroids. “It could be a remnant of a catastrophic event,” said Cristina Thomas, a planetary scientist and planetary defense researcher at Northern Arizona University.

As a quasi-moon, Kamo‘oalewa loops around and keeps in lock-step with Earth, but it’s not a genuine moon because it’s gravitationally tied to the sun. It poses no danger to us, but quasi-moons like Kamo‘oalewa offer clues as to how asteroids that started life between Mars and Jupiter ended up at Earth’s doorstep — something that scientists concerned about potentially killer asteroids are keen to learn more about.

Tianwen-2 won’t just admire this asteroid from afar. After conducting science observations from above, it will swoop down and collect some pristine asteroid matter from Kamoʻoalewa before returning it to Earth in late 2027.

“The sampling is definitely going to be challenging,” Dr. Raducan said. But if China pulls it off, it will become the third nation to lift material directly from an asteroid, after Japan and the United States.

Tianwen-2, whose name is often translated to “Questions to Heaven,” traveled 620 million miles through space to rendezvous with the asteroid, which is “about the length of a bowling lane,” Dr. Thomas said. “Kamo‘oalewa is the smallest object that humans have visited with a spacecraft.”

Based on Tianwen-2’s first photo, the asteroid resembles a rocky splinter. “It looks exactly like an intact shard that we get from impact experiments in laboratory,” Dr. Raducan said.

Scientists briefly wondered if Kamo‘oalewa might be a chunk of our own moon, created by an asteroid impact millions of years ago.

That theory has fallen out of favor. Scientists found that it’s much more likely that Kamo‘oalewa started out as an object in the main belt of asteroids just beyond Mars.

A recent, preliminary examination of Kamo‘oalewa using the remarkably perceptive James Webb Space Telescope also revealed it to be a very reflective object, and not something darker and moon-like. This survey also uncovered hints that its surface composition is akin to a rare type of meteorite known as an aubrite.

Aubrites are particularly exciting because they might come from a massive, smashed-up asteroid-like object that had its own active geologic processes, including those that made magma, rocky layers and perhaps even a metal core — almost like a miniature planet. It’s possible that Kamo‘oalewa may be the remains of something similar.

For now, nobody can be certain as to what exactly Kamo‘oalewa may be. “It takes coordinated efforts across several disciplines to find the story that can explain everything best,” said Benjamin Sharkey, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland.

But, if all goes according to plan, we’re about to find out the truth. Sometime in the next few months, Tianwen-2 will plunge toward Kamo‘oalewa and attempt to extract some of its rocky debris in one of several ways, including using jets of gas to agitate the surface grains into a container, and anchoring itself to the asteroid before drilling into it. Should it succeed, the spacecraft will depart Kamoʻoalewa with the goods in April 2027.

But the asteroid won’t make it easy for China.

When the United States and Japan brought asteroid samples to Earth, the samples were pebbly objects barely held together by their own gravity. While interacting with them had their own spaceflight challenges, scooping them up into a storage capsule wasn’t too difficult.

Kamo‘oalewa, however, may be a solid, rigid rock. “It’ll be the first time we visited something like that,” said Andy Rivkin, a planetary scientist and planetary defense researcher at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

The quasi-moon’s Hawaiian name means “wobbling celestial object.” As it swivels around once every 28 minutes, it’s more like a rapidly moving spinning top — something that could imperil Tianwen-2’s touchdown.

And the fact that Kamo‘oalewa is so tiny means that Tianwen-2 — which, weighing around two tons, is no pipsqueak — could have an outsize effect on the asteroid itself. “The hope is that while drilling, the spacecraft doesn’t push the asteroid on a different orbit,” Dr. Raducan said, “given that their relative sizes are so similar.”