Admit it: In your secret heart of hearts, you're petrified that a giant asteroid will someday hit the earth, wiping out all life before humans get the chance to do it themselves.
If so, take comfort in this. A joint research project run from Japan and Europe has, if not that exact concern, then at least a powerful interest in figuring out which floating chunks of rocks in the solar system might actually prove dangerous one day.
A space-based infrared observatory named Akari, launched in February of last year, is giving this task a new boost. Last week, researchers said they had turned the observatory on a well-studied asteroid named Itokawa, getting infrared data that will help them develop models improving the estimates of other asteroids' sizes.
This particular piece of debris has been the subject of other studies aimed at determining its size, with infrared estimates providing the most accurate measures to date. But this time, the data can be correlated with information – and even pictures – sent back by JAXA's (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hayabusa asteroid explorer, which visited the rock in April.
Is there really any danger from this floating boulder? Not any time soon. It's moving fast across the sky, 42 million miles away from Earth (the Sun is 150 million miles kilometers (or 93 million miles, thank you for catching that, commenters) away, by comparison), and on nothing like a collision course. But that's not the point. The knowledge gained from studying Itokawa's increasingly known quantity will help scientists better understand whether someday there might be reason for concern.
(Photo: Close-up of Itokawa, from Hayabusa mission. Credit: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS))
