{"id":614198,"date":"2026-09-04T11:36:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T11:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/614198\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T11:36:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T11:36:10","slug":"the-300-year-old-tool-helping-stranded-astronauts-get-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/614198\/","title":{"rendered":"The 300-year-old tool helping stranded astronauts get home"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"Paragraph-styles__ParagraphStyled-sc-ffb5f5ba-0 fqhmpl\">For Mars missions, those navigational points may include asteroids, Holt says. &#8220;We would say [to the astronaut], we expect that the asteroid is going to be half-way between the two head stars in <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/science.nasa.gov\/solar-system\/skywatching\/night-sky-network\/gemini-constellation\/\" class=\"LinkUrl-styles__LinkUrlStyled-sc-f4e3b82f-0 eGAhOs\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Gemini<\/a>, so look over there, find that asteroid between those two stars, take your readings, then compare that against the expectations and do the maths.&#8221; If the readings are off, the astronauts correct the course to get to where they want to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For Mars missions, those navigational points may include asteroids, Holt says. &#8220;We would say [to the astronaut], we&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":614199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":["post-614198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=614198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/614199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}