{"id":241175,"date":"2026-07-19T04:04:32","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T09:04:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/japan-space-probe-skims-asteroid-in-test-for-planetary-defense"},"modified":"2026-07-19T04:04:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T09:04:32","slug":"japan-space-probe-skims-asteroid-in-test-for-planetary-defense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/japan-space-probe-skims-asteroid-in-test-for-planetary-defense","title":{"rendered":"Japan space probe skims asteroid in test for planetary defense"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/japan-space-probe-skims-asteroid-in-test-for-planetary-defense2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A Japanese space probe performed a flyby of a near-Earth asteroid on Sunday in a test mission for technology that could help protect the planet from space rocks.<\/p>\n<p>The fridge-sized Hayabusa2 was due to fly within 800 meters (0.5 miles) of asteroid Torifune, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) scientists said earlier, a trial run to see whether such a probe could deflect a potentially dangerous space rock away from Earth.<\/p>\n<p>The mission comes after NASA deliberately smashed a spacecraft into the 160-meter-wide (525-foot-wide) Dimorphos asteroid in 2022, successfully altering its orbit around a larger space rock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Japanese space probe performed a flyby of a near-Earth asteroid on Sunday in a test mission for technology that could help protect the planet from space rocks. The fridge-sized Hayabusa2 was due to fly within 800 meters (0.5 miles) of asteroid Torifune, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) scientists said earlier, a trial run to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-241175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241175","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\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}