Earth-bound asteroids will be the topic of a five-day international space conference held at Cornell University beginning on July 26.

The risk of a devastating collision with an asteroid or comet has been the subject of considerable debate among astronomers, and has recently been brought into the mainstream with movies depicting end-of-the world scenarios. But the concern is not all rooted in fiction: a three-year study by the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory detected 49 asteroids whose paths bring them close to Earth.

The conference is expected to draw about 500 scientists from countries including India, China, Russia, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic. They will be discussing, among other topics, the composition of large asteroids of the use of radar imaging to discover new asteroids and comets whose paths may come near the Earth.