What is the brightest asteroid?
The brightest asteroid is Vesta, with a surface mysteriously some three times as bright as Earth’s moon. Its unusual brightness suggests it might possess a strong magnetic field, which could help shield it from particles driven by the solar wind that would ordinarily dirty the asteroid. The Dawn spacecraft is currently venturing to Vesta and the largest body in the asteroid belt, Ceres, but “Dawn doesn’t have a magnetometer to figure that out,” Durda noted. “It’d be nice to have one on a future mission.” Are we in danger? As a near-Earth asteroid, Itokawa represents the first asteroid a space mission has ever visited that is potentially hazardous to humanity. So far, 812 near-Earth asteroids more than a half-mile (1 km) wide have been found. Scientists have ruled out the chances of an Earth impact for all of these large objects, but lesser objects also pose a risk, and researchers estimate dozens of large near-Earth objects remain to be found. Researchers are gaining an ever better kno
