内容摘要：“She’s the queen. That’s it,” Peiris said. “There will be no other queens in Sri Lanka. She will be the first and the last.”

“She’s the queen. That’s it,” Peiris said. “There will be no other queens in Sri Lanka. She will be the first and the last.”

Over the next year, Tianwen-2 will approach a small near-Earth asteroid some 10 million miles (16 million km) away, named “469219 Kamoʻoalewa”, also known as 2016HO3.The spacecraft is scheduled to arrive at the asteroid, which researchers believe is potentially a fragment of the Moon, in July 2026. It will then shoot the capsule with rock samples back to Earth for a landing in November 2027.

If successful, China would become only the third country to carry out such a mission after Japan first fetched samples from a small asteroid in 2010, followed by the United States in 2020.The People’s Daily state-run newspaper described the mission’s purpose as an “endeavour to shed light on the formation and evolution of asteroids and the early solar system”.The newspaper quoted Shan Zhongde, the head of the CNSA, as saying that the mission represented a “significant step in China’s new journey of interplanetary exploration”. He added that the mission was expected to yield “groundbreaking discoveries and expanding humanity’s knowledge of the cosmos”.

The mission has multiple goals over the “decade-long expedition”, according to Chinese state media, including “collecting samples from near-Earth asteroid 2016HO3” and “exploring the main-belt comet 311P”.It will also aim to measure the “physical parameters of the two celestial targets”, including their “orbital dynamics, rotation, size, shape and thermal properties”.

The samples will be used to determine the “physical properties, chemical and mineral composition and structural characteristics” of asteroids, according to researchers working on the project.

As a quasi-satellite of Earth that has orbited the Sun in a synchronised path with the Earth for nearly a century, 2016HO3 has a diameter of between 120 feet (40 metres) and 300 feet (100 metres).The accord aims to prevent a repeat of the disjointed response and international disarray that surrounded the COVID-19 pandemic by improving coordination, surveillance and access to medicines during any future pandemics.

“It’s an historic day,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said after the vote.The agreement’s text was

finalised last monthafter multiple rounds of tense negotiations.