China plans to launch an ambitious asteroid exploration mission and has invited collaborators to put their experiments on the probes, space agency officials said Thursday. The 10-year mission will involve a probe sent to a near-Earth asteroid to collect samples, said Liu Jizhong, head of China's Exploration and Space Engineering Centre. After the sample collection from the 2016 HO3 asteroid, the probe will return to Earth orbit where it will split into two. A capsule carrying the samples will return to Earth's surface, while a separate module will approach and orbit the comet 133P. A similar call was made for...