The asteroid has survived in space for nearly as long as the solar system has existed
Dust collected from the surface of an ancient, peanut-shaped and"potentially-hazardous" asteroid has revealed that some space rocks are much bouncier and harder to destroy than first thought — posing concerns about Earth’s long-term safety.
The dust samples were collected from Itokawa in 2005 during the Japanese Space Agency’s Hayabusa 1 mission, which sent a probe on a 3.8 billion mile round-trip to land on the asteroid — scraping the tiny grains from its surface before safely returning them to Earth in 2010. "We set out to answer whether rubble pile asteroids are resistant to being shocked or whether they fragment at the slightest knock," co-author Nick Timms, a geologist at the University of Curtin, said in the statement."Now that we have found they can survive in the solar system for almost its entire history, they must be more abundant in the asteroid belt than previously thought, so there is more chance that if a big asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, it will be a rubble pile.
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