Two probes reached two asteroids the same weekend — and both rocks were two things stuck together

Space 3 min 80 sources

While the US marked its 250th birthday, Japan's Hayabusa2 flew past a peanut-shaped asteroid and China's Tianwen-2 arrived at Earth's quasi-moon. Plus a nearby planet that might hold water, and Amazon's satellite internet nears launch.

Key takeaways

Two spacecraft reached two asteroids the same weekend, and both rocks turned out to be two bodies stuck together — "contact binaries."
Both missions are budget-stretchers: Japan's Hayabusa2 is running a decade-long bonus tour on leftover fuel, and China's Tianwen-2 will try to bring samples home next year.
A rocky planet 25 light-years away may lie in its star's habitable zone, but flares from its red dwarf sun could strip any atmosphere — a candidate, not a confirmed second Earth.

Over the weekend, as the United States marked its 250th birthday with fireworks, two Asian space agencies quietly reached two different asteroids millions of kilometres away.[1] On Sunday, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft flew past a small asteroid called Torifune.[1] Hours later, China’s space agency released the first close-up image of Kamoʻoalewa, a rock its Tianwen-2 probe had just reached after a 1-billion-kilometre journey.[2] Both spacecraft found the same surprising thing: their target wasn’t a single lump but two bodies fused together.

Two old missions, still working

Hayabusa2 is not new. It launched in December 2014, reached an asteroid called Ryugu in 2018, and dropped a capsule of samples back to Earth in 2020.[3] Scientists recovered 5.4 grams of asteroid rock from that capsule.[3] But the spacecraft still had roughly 30 kilograms of xenon propellant left — about half its supply — so engineers plotted a decade-long extension to visit two more rocks.[3]

Torifune is the first of those. It’s about 450 metres long, and Hayabusa2 passed within roughly 800 metres of it.[3] The images, taken from about 1 kilometre away, show a contact binary — two lobes of similar size joined by a narrow neck, like a peanut or a snowman.[4] “Perhaps the best example that I have ever seen,” said Sara Russell of the Natural History Museum in London, part of the science team.[4] JAXA has only received part of the data so far; the rest will trickle down over coming weeks.[3]

China’s probe reaches a quasi-moon

Tianwen-2 launched in May 2025 and travelled about 1 billion kilometres over 400 days to reach Kamoʻoalewa, arriving 20 kilometres from the asteroid.[2] The image released on 6 July shows a small, elongated rocky body.[2] China kept quiet during the approach, though European radio trackers had spotted the spacecraft making engine burns as it closed in.[2]

Kamoʻoalewa is unusual. It’s a quasi-moon — an asteroid that loops around the Sun in step with Earth, so it appears to accompany us without truly orbiting our planet.[5] Some scientists think it may be a chunk of our own Moon, blasted off by a large impact between 1 and 10 million years ago.[5] Tianwen-2 will now attempt to grab samples and return them to Earth late next year.[2]

A nearby planet that might hold water

Away from the asteroids, astronomers reported a rocky planet just 25 light-years away that may sit in its star’s habitable zone — the band where liquid water could exist.[6] The planet, GJ 3378b, orbits a faint red dwarf star in the constellation Camelopardalis, the Giraffe.[6] It’s about 2.3 times Earth’s mass, a “super-Earth.”[7]

The catch: red dwarfs are small, dim, and prone to violent flares of radiation.[7] It remains unclear whether GJ 3378b’s atmosphere — if it has one — could survive that hostile wind.[6] Twenty-five light-years is close by cosmic standards, but still about 240 trillion kilometres.[6] This is a candidate worth studying, not a confirmed second Earth.[6]

Amazon’s satellite internet nears launch

On the commercial side, Amazon’s Leo network — its rival to SpaceX’s Starlink — passed roughly 400 satellites in orbit and plans to start initial internet service later this year.[8] The last launch of United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket carried 29 of those satellites into orbit on 2 July.[8] Amazon has now launched enough hardware to switch on early service, though the company itself is telling first customers to keep expectations modest while the network fills out.[9]

One to watch: a giant asteroid we’ll all see in 2029

Scientists met in Padua, Italy, this month to plan for Apophis — a skyscraper-sized asteroid that will make a very close but safe pass by Earth in 2029.[10] It will come near enough that billions of people will be able to watch it cross the sky with the naked eye.[10] Researchers are already charting exactly when and where it will be visible, three years out.[10] It’s a rare chance to see a real asteroid move against the stars — no telescope needed.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

Big things are mostly small things that stuck

The solar system built its planets not by carving them out of a whole, but by gentle collisions that stuck — and most of what we call an object is really a crowd that stopped moving apart.

Two rocks, one shape

Two spacecraft reached two different asteroids the same weekend, and both found the same thing: not one rock, but two, joined at a narrow neck. A peanut. A snowman. Scientists call it a contact binary — two bodies that drifted together, touched, and never came apart.

It looks like a curiosity. It is actually a snapshot of how the whole solar system got made.

The universe builds by adding, not by subtracting

We tend to imagine large things as carved down from something larger — a statue from a block, a coastline from a continent. The solar system worked the other way. It started as dust and gas. Grains bumped into grains and stuck. Clumps met clumps and stuck. Given enough time and enough gentle collisions, pebbles became boulders, boulders became mountains, and some of those mountains kept growing until they were planets.

A contact binary is that process frozen halfway. Two objects came close, met slowly enough not to shatter, and fused. Watch long enough and one becomes bigger. Watch a few billion years and you get a world.

The scientist studying the peanut-shaped asteroid said exactly this: these joined rocks show “how small bodies in the solar system grow into progressively larger objects and eventually into planets.” The asteroid is not an oddity. It is the ordinary way things get big.

The same pattern, everywhere you look

Once you see it, you see it off the asteroid too. A city is not carved from a plain; it is a market and a road and a house and another house, each one added because the last one was already there. A language is not designed; it is a word borrowed, a phrase kept, a grammar that drifted and stuck. A reputation, a habit, a savings account, a coral reef — none of them arrive whole. They accrete. Each piece joins because there was already something for it to join.

The rock and the reef and the reputation share a rule: what exists makes it easier for the next thing to attach. The clump that got a little bigger pulled in the next grain a little harder. Success gathers success. That is why big things, once started, are hard to stop — and why they almost never appear from nothing.

The slow collisions matter more than the fast ones

Here is the part that’s easy to miss. The asteroids stuck together because they met gently. A fast collision shatters both bodies and scatters the pieces. A slow one lets them settle and hold. The building only happens at the speed where things can stay joined.

This is true well beyond space. The connections that last — between people, between ideas, between a company and its customers — tend to be the ones formed without violence, at a pace that let them settle. The dramatic, high-speed meetings make the news. The quiet ones make the structure.

What the rock lets us see, and what it doesn’t

There is something honest about a contact binary. It shows its seams. You can see it was two things, because it hasn’t finished becoming one. Give it more time and gravity will round it off, blur the neck, hide the join — and it will look, to a later observer, like it was always a single thing.

Almost everything solid around us has passed through that hiding. The planet under your feet looks like one object. It is the settled crowd of a trillion smaller ones, its seams long since smoothed away. The institutions we treat as permanent, the borders that seem like plain fact, the fortunes that look like they were always there — each was assembled, piece by piece, by people and accidents most of us can no longer name.

We are inside that crowd, not above it. The asteroid is generous enough to still show its parts. Most of the wholes we deal with have stopped showing theirs — which is exactly why it’s worth remembering they had them, and how little any one of us saw of the sticking that made them.

03 · Lab · your turn

Build an Asteroid

Fling rocks at a growing body and discover that only gentle collisions stick and build, while fast ones shatter it back to dust.

04 · Hope · carry this

The great things get built the same slow way the asteroids did — one small piece joining the last, gently enough to hold. What looks whole and finished around you is really patience made visible, and you are still adding to it.