162173 Ryugu
Apollo asteroid
162173 Ryugu (provisional designation 1999 JU3) is a near-Earth object and also a potentially hazardous asteroid of the Apollo group. It measures approximately 900 metres (3,000 ft) in diameter and is a dark object of the rare spectral type Cb, with qualities of both a C-type asteroid and a B-type asteroid. In June 2018, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 arrived at the asteroid. After making measurements and taking samples, Hayabusa2 left Ryugu for Earth in November 2019 and returned the sample capsule to Earth on 5 December 2020. The samples showed the presence of organic compounds, such as uracil (one of the four components in RNA) and vitamin B3.
The public source identifies “162173 Ryugu” as apollo asteroid. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Ryugu, Apollo and asteroid.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2018, 2019 and 2020.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “162173 Ryugu” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.