{"id":116224,"date":"2020-11-23T08:26:37","date_gmt":"2020-11-23T16:26:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/11\/spacecraft-with-precious-asteroid-cargo-is-almost-home-after-5-billion-km-trek"},"modified":"2020-11-23T08:26:37","modified_gmt":"2020-11-23T16:26:37","slug":"spacecraft-with-precious-asteroid-cargo-is-almost-home-after-5-billion-km-trek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/11\/spacecraft-with-precious-asteroid-cargo-is-almost-home-after-5-billion-km-trek","title":{"rendered":"Spacecraft With Precious Asteroid Cargo Is Almost Home After 5-Billion Km Trek"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/spacecraft-with-precious-asteroid-cargo-is-almost-home-after-5-billion-km-trek.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In the dusty desert town of Woomera, in the South Australian desert, scientists are getting ready. On 6 December 2020, after six years in space, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft will finally return to Earth.<\/p>\n<p>It carries with it a cargo unbelievably rare, precious, and hard-won \u2014 at least 100 milligrams of material collected from the surface of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/asteroid\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"asteroid\">asteroid<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/162173_Ryugu\">Ryugu<\/a>. It will drop the capsule containing the sample to Earth, the spacecraft itself continuing on to visit more asteroid targets.<\/p>\n<p>Hayabusa2\u2019s return will mark a milestone in a remarkable feat of space science, a total journey of around 5.24 billion kilometres (almost 3.3 billion miles). Asteroid Ryugu \u2014 formerly known as 1999 JU3 \u2014 is on an elliptical orbit that carries it just inside Earth\u2019s orbital path around the Sun, and out almost as far as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/mars\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Mars\">Mars<\/a>\u2019 orbit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the dusty desert town of Woomera, in the South Australian desert, scientists are getting ready. On 6 December 2020, after six years in space, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft will finally return to Earth. It carries with it a cargo unbelievably rare, precious, and hard-won \u2014 at least 100 milligrams of material [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-habitats","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}