Building an Asteroid belt

The Main Belt covers a space 140 million miles across and is between Mars and Jupiter, nearly two to four times the Earth-Sun distance. The belt's objects are classified into eight subgroups, each named for the major asteroids in that group. The Hungarias, Floras, Phocaea, Koronis, Eos, Themis, Cybeles, and Hildas are the names of these groupings.

Although Hollywood frequently depicts ships passing through asteroid belts, the journey is typically uneventful. A number of spacecraft, notably NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto, have passed through the asteroid belt without incident.

Building an Asteroid belt


"Fortunately," New Horizons principle investigator Alan Stern stated, "the asteroid belt is so wide that, despite its dense population of tiny rocks, the probability of hitting with one is almost vanishingly small, far less than one in a billion." "You have to aim for an asteroid if you want to get near enough to study it in depth."

Kirkwood gaps are relatively vacant places inside the asteroid belt. These gaps correlate to Jupiter's orbital resonances. The gravitational pull of the gas giant makes these places much drier than the rest of the belt. Asteroids can be more concentrated at different resonances.

Discovery of the asteroid belt

Johann Titius, a German astronomer from the 18th century, noticed a mathematical pattern in the arrangement of the planets and utilized it to predict the presence of one between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers searched the sky for this missing body. In 1800, 25 astronomers created the Celestial Police, with each scouring 15 degrees of the Zodiac for the lost planet.

Read More — Origins of Asteroid Belt

However, the first body discovered in this area was discovered by a nonmember, Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, who called it Ceres. Pallas, the second body, was discovered a little more than a year later.

Both of these objects were once referred to as planets. However, the pace of finding of these things increased, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century, more than 100 had been discovered. Scientists immediately concluded that they were too tiny to be classified as planets and began to refer to them as asteroids.