"the naked eye. On some rare occasions, a near-Earth asteroid may briefly become visible without technical aid; see 99942 Apophis. The mass of all the objects of the asteroid belt, lying between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is estimated to be about 2.8–, or about 4% of the mass of the Moon. Of this, Ceres comprises , a third of the total. Adding in the next three most massive objects, Vesta (9%), Pallas (7%), and Hygiea (3%), brings this figure up to 51%; whereas the three after that, 511 Davida (1.2%), 704 Interamnia (1.0%), and 52 Europa (0.9%), only"
"belt occupies the orbit between Mars and Jupiter, between from the Sun. It is thought to be remnants from the Solar System's formation that failed to coalesce because of the gravitational interference of Jupiter. The asteroid belt contains tens of thousands, possibly millions, of objects over one kilometre in diameter. Despite this, the total mass of the asteroid belt is unlikely to be more than a thousandth of that of Earth. The asteroid belt is very sparsely populated; spacecraft routinely pass through without incident. The outer region of the Solar System is home to the giant planets and their large"
"consisting of a large number asteroids that orbit the sun primarily between 2.2 and 3.2 AU (Earth-Sun distance) which is between the orbits of planets Mars and Jupiter. Crossing the asteroid belt is possible, because although there are over a million asteroids larger than 1 km in diameter. The distance between them is so large spacecraft pass through empty space. This was established in the early 1970s when Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 traversed the belt for the first time. There is some increased probability of encountering dust, but otherwise it takes special planning to actually pass very close to"
"approaching Ceres at aphelion, which may constrain Dawn's ability to observe this phenomenon. Note: This info was taken directly from the main article, sources for the material are included there. Asteroids, comets, and meteoroids are all debris remaining from the nebula in which the Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago. The asteroid belt is located between Mars and Jupiter. It is made of thousands of rocky planetesimals from to a few meters across. These are thought to be debris of the formation of the Solar System that could not form a planet due to Jupiter's gravity. When asteroids collide"
"main belt's background population when applying the hierarchical clustering method to its proper orbital elements. Based on osculating Keplerian orbital elements, the asteroid has also been classified as a member of the Nysa family (), the largest asteroid family of the main belt, consisting of stony and carbonaceous subfamilies. The family, named after 44 Nysa, is located in the inner belt near the Kirkwood gap (3:1 orbital resonance with Jupiter), a depleted zone that separates the central main belt. It orbits the Sun in the inner asteroid belt at a distance of 2.1–2.8 AU once every 3 years and 11"
"lie within a nearly flat disc called the ecliptic. The Solar System also contains smaller objects. The asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, mostly contains objects composed, like the terrestrial planets, of rock and metal. Beyond Neptune's orbit lie the Kuiper belt and scattered disc, which are populations of trans-Neptunian objects composed mostly of ices, and beyond them a newly discovered population of sednoids. Within these populations are several dozen to possibly tens of thousands of objects large enough that they have been rounded by their own gravity. Such objects are categorized as dwarf planets."
"his honor . The asteroid, a main belt object in orbit between Mars and Jupiter, was discovered by astronomer Brian A. Skiff at Lowell Observatory’s Anderson Mesa Station in 1984 and the citation was proposed and written by astronomer David H. Levy. Eicher's books include ""COMETS! Visitors from Deep Space"" (Cambridge University Press).; a book with Brian May, guitarist and singer from the rock group Queen, and astronomer Garik Israelian, constituting the conference proceedings, lectures, and information from the first Starmus Festival, a science and music event held in 2011 in the Canary Islands; and ""The New Cosmos: Answering Astronomy’s"
"recent observations, such as the analysis of the cometary dust collected by the ""Stardust"" probe, are increasingly blurring the distinction between comets and asteroids, suggesting ""a continuum between asteroids and comets"" rather than a sharp dividing line. The minor planets beyond Jupiter's orbit are sometimes also called ""asteroids"", especially in popular presentations. However, it is becoming increasingly common for the term ""asteroid"" to be restricted to minor planets of the inner Solar System. Therefore, this article will restrict itself for the most part to the classical asteroids: objects of the asteroid belt, Jupiter trojans, and near-Earth objects. When the IAU"
"Kuiper belt The Kuiper belt (), occasionally called the Edgeworth–Kuiper belt, is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune (at 30 AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive. Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies or remnants from when the Solar System formed. While many asteroids are composed primarily of rock and metal, most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles (termed ""ices""), such as methane,"
"65 Cybele Cybele ( minor planet designation: 65 Cybele) is one of the largest asteroids in the Solar System and is located in the outer asteroid belt. It gives its name to the Cybele group of asteroids that orbit outward from the Sun from the 2:1 orbital resonance with Jupiter. The X-type asteroid has a relatively short rotation period of 6.0814 hours. It was discovered by Wilhelm Tempel in 1861, and named after Cybele, the earth goddess. ""Cybele"" was discovered on 8 March 1861, by German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel from the Marseilles Observatory in southeastern France. A minor controversy arose"
"Moon, or 22% that of Pluto, and roughly twice that of Pluto's moon Charon (whose diameter is 1200 km). Ceres, the asteroid belt's only dwarf planet, is about 950 km in diameter, whereas 4 Vesta, 2 Pallas, and 10 Hygiea have mean diameters of less than 600 km. The remaining bodies range down to the size of a dust particle. The asteroid material is so thinly distributed that numerous unmanned spacecraft have traversed it without incident. Nonetheless, collisions between large asteroids do occur, and these can produce an asteroid family whose members have similar orbital characteristics and compositions. Individual asteroids"
", and . The orbits of these bodies are unusual. They orbit in the outermost edge of the asteroid belt in a 4:3 orbital resonance with Jupiter, the result of the periodic force Jupiter exerts on a body with Thule's orbital period, in the same way (though with the reverse effect) as the Kirkwood gaps in the more inner parts of the asteroid belt. 279 Thule Thule ( , , ; minor planet designation: 279 Thule) is a large asteroid from the outer asteroid belt. It is classified as a D-type asteroid and is probably composed of organic-rich silicates, carbon"
"the inner planets, the asteroid belt, and the outer planets. The inner terrestrial planets consist of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. The outer gas giant planets are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Beyond Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt, and finally the Oort Cloud, which may extend as far as a light-year. The planets were formed 4.6 billion years ago in the protoplanetary disk that surrounded the early Sun. Through a process that included gravitational attraction, collision, and accretion, the disk formed clumps of matter that, with time, became protoplanets. The radiation pressure of the solar wind then expelled most of"
"Babylonian ruler of the same name in an attempt to co-opt the creation for himself, leading to some confusion among readers) collided catastrophically with Tiamat (a goddess in the Babylonian creation myth the ""Enûma Eliš""), which he considers to be another planet once located between Mars and Jupiter. This collision supposedly formed the planet Earth, the asteroid belt, and the comets. Sitchin states that when struck by one of planet Nibiru's moons, Tiamat split in two, and then on a second pass Nibiru itself struck the broken fragments and one half of Tiamat became the asteroid belt. The second half,"
"their outward migration and a transfer of planetesimals inward from the outer belt to Jupiter. Jupiter, in contrast, ejects most of the planetesimals from the Solar System, and as a result migrates inward. After 10 million years the divergent migration of the planets leads to resonance crossings, exciting the eccentricities of the giant planets and destabilizing the planetary system when Neptune is near 28 AU. During this instability the extra ice giant enters a Saturn-crossing orbit and is scattered inward by Saturn onto a Jupiter-crossing orbit. Repeated gravitational encounters with the ice giant cause jumps in Jupiter's and Saturn's semi-major"
"objects active asteroids. The first main-belt comet discovered is 7968 Elst–Pizarro. It was discovered in 1979 and was found to have a tail by Eric Elst and Guido Pizarro in 1996 and given the cometary designation 133P/Elst-Pizarro. Unlike comets, which spend most of their orbit at Jupiter-like or greater distances from the Sun, main-belt comets follow near-circular orbits within the asteroid belt that are undistinguishable from the orbits of many standard asteroids. Although quite a few short-period comets have semimajor axes well within Jupiter's orbit, main-belt comets differ in having small eccentricities and inclinations similar to main-belt asteroids. The first"
"maintain its orientation using the two Sun sensors. While passing through interplanetary medium, ""Pioneer 10"" became the first mission to detect interplanetary atoms of helium. It also observed high-energy ions of aluminum and sodium in the solar wind. The spacecraft recorded important heliophysics data in early August 1972 by registering a solar shock wave when it was at a distance of 2.2 AU. On July 15, 1972, ""Pioneer 10"" was the first spacecraft to enter the asteroid belt, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The project planners expected a safe passage through the belt, and the closest the"
"from the asteroid belt or excited their orbital inclinations and eccentricities. Some of those massive embryos too were ejected by Jupiter, while others may have migrated to the inner Solar System and played a role in the final accretion of the terrestrial planets. During this primary depletion period, the effects of the giant planets and planetary embryos left the asteroid belt with a total mass equivalent to less than 1% that of the Earth, composed mainly of small planetesimals. This is still 10–20 times more than the current mass in the main belt, which is now about . A secondary"
"given minimum mass. The planet has one of the longest orbits currently known for an extrasolar planet. The planet's mean distance from the star is close to the distance between Jupiter and the Sun. However, unlike Jupiter it has an eccentric orbit. At periastron the distance between the planet and the star is only 2.51 AU and at apastron the distance is as much as 5.33 AU (compared to the Solar System, distance from the Sun to the inner asteroid belt and from Sun to just beyond the orbit of Jupiter). The signal produced by the planet is very weak"
"asteroids dominated the outer region beyond the ice line. As Jupiter and Saturn migrate inward, ~15% of the inner asteroids are scattered outward onto orbits beyond Saturn. After reversing course, Jupiter and Saturn first encounter these objects, scattering about 0.5% of the original population back inward onto stable orbits. Later, as Jupiter and Saturn migrate into the outer region, about 0.5% of the primitive asteroids are scattered onto orbits in the outer asteroid belt. The encounters with Jupiter and Saturn leave many of the captured asteroids with large eccentricities and inclinations. Some of the icy asteroids are also left in"
"was ejected. The stirring of semi-major axes by the ice giant may also remove fossil Kirkwood gaps formed before the instability. Planetesimals from the outer disc are embedded in all parts of the asteroid belt, remaining as P- and D-type asteroids. While Jupiter's resonances sweep across the asteroid belt, outer disk planetesimals are captured by its inner resonances, evolve to lower eccentricities via secular resonances with in these resonances, and are released onto stable orbits as Jupiter's resonances move on. Other planetesimals are implanted in the asteroid belt during encounters with the ice giant, either directly leaving them with aphelia"
"into Jupiter's magnetosphere, producing a torus of particles about the planet. As Io moves through this torus, the interaction generates Alfvén waves that carry ionized matter into the polar regions of Jupiter. As a result, radio waves are generated through a cyclotron maser mechanism, and the energy is transmitted out along a cone-shaped surface. When Earth intersects this cone, the radio emissions from Jupiter can exceed the solar radio output. Jupiter is the only planet whose barycenter with the Sun lies outside the volume of the Sun, though by only 7% of the Sun's radius. The average distance between Jupiter"
"Hoover. In 1986, assuming that the asteroid was of S-type and that it had a diameter of 15 km, the rotational period was measured to be 38 hours. Observations by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite have since shown that it has a diameter of 33.2±1.3 km, with an absolute magnitude of 11.20 and an albedo of 0.053±0.004. 916 America 916 America is a minor planet orbiting the Sun in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. It was discovered on 7 August 1915 by the Russian astronomer Grigory Nikolaevich Neujmin at Simeis, Russian Empire. Originally designated 916I, it was renamed '916"
"postulated that it was a thriving world in a very different planetary system, with jungles and oceans, whose orbit was disrupted by the arrival of a large planet or very small star (less than twenty times the size of Jupiter) which passed through the planetary system between 65 million and four billion years ago. The new orbits caused Tiamat to collide with one of the moons of this object, which is known as Nibiru. The debris from this collision are thought by the theory's proponents to have variously formed the asteroid belt, the Moon, and the current inclination of the"
"before Charon was discovered. Pluto is more than twice the diameter and a dozen times the mass of the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. It is less massive than the dwarf planet Eris, a trans-Neptunian object discovered in 2005, though Pluto has a larger diameter of 2376.6 km compared to Eris's approximate diameter of 2326 km. Determinations of Pluto's size had been complicated by its atmosphere, and hydrocarbon haze. In March 2014, Lellouch, de Bergh et al. published findings regarding methane mixing ratios in Pluto's atmosphere consistent with a Plutonian diameter greater than 2360 km,"
"eccentricities of the terrestrial planets and avoid leaving the asteroid belt with too many high eccentricity asteroids, it also reduces the fraction of asteroids removed from the main asteroid belt, leaving a now nearly depleted inner band of asteroids as the primary source of the impactors of the LHB. The ice giant is often ejected following its encounter with Jupiter leading some to propose that the Solar System began with five giant planets. Recent works, however, have found that impacts from this inner asteroid belt would be insufficient to explain the formation of ancient impact spherule beds and the lunar"
"of 2.95, below the threshold of 3.0 defined for main-belt asteroids. ACO's may be extinct comets. It is the namesake and largest member of the small dynamical Griqua group (known as the ""Griquas""), a ""marginally unstable"" group of asteroids observed in the Hecuba gap, a resonant zone with the gas giant Jupiter (2/1J). ""Griqua"" itself is background asteroids and does not belong to any known asteroid family. This asteroid orbits the Sun in the outermost asteroid belt at a distance of 2.0–4.4 AU once every 5 years and 9 months (2,107 days; semi-major axis of 3.22 AU). Its orbit has"
"2060 Chiron 2060 Chiron (), provisional designation , and also known as 95P/Chiron, is a small solar system body (or minor planet) in the outer Solar System, orbiting the Sun between Saturn and Uranus. Discovered in 1977 by Charles Kowal, it was the first-identified member of a new class of objects now known as centaurs—bodies orbiting between the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt. Although it was initially called an asteroid and classified only as a minor planet with the designation ""2060 Chiron"", it was later found to exhibit behavior typical of a comet. Today it is classified as both"
"accepted origin of these asteroids is that main-belt asteroids are moved into the inner Solar System through orbital resonances with Jupiter. The interaction with Jupiter through the resonance perturbs the asteroid's orbit and it comes into the inner Solar System. The asteroid belt has gaps, known as Kirkwood gaps, where these resonances occur as the asteroids in these resonances have been moved onto other orbits. New asteroids migrate into these resonances, due to the Yarkovsky effect that provides a continuing supply of near-Earth asteroids. Compared to the entire mass of the asteroid belt, the mass loss necessary to sustain the"
"main belt at all. It orbits the Sun in the outer asteroid belt at a distance of 2.8–3.0 AU once every 4 years and 11 months (1,794 days; semi-major axis of 2.89 AU), which is near the 5:2 resonance with Jupiter (2.82 AU). Its orbit has an eccentricity of 0.03 and an inclination of 2° with respect to the ecliptic. The asteroid was first observed as and at the observatories at Simeiz and Algiers in October 1916, respectively. Its observation arc begins with the latter observation at Algiers on 31 October 1916, more than 7 years prior its official discovery"
"major planets completely control the orbits of the other bodies within their orbital zone. Jupiter may coexist with a large number of small bodies in its orbit (the Trojan asteroids), but these bodies only exist in Jupiter's orbit because they are in the sway of the planet's huge gravity. Similarly, Pluto may cross the orbit of Neptune, but Neptune long ago locked Pluto and its attendant Kuiper belt objects, called plutinos, into a 3:2 resonance, i.e., they orbit the Sun twice for every three Neptune orbits. The orbits of these objects are entirely dictated by Neptune's gravity, and thus, Neptune"
"of Mars, such as 15817 Lucianotesi, can be considered part of an Earth–Mars belt. Not all asteroids located entirely between the orbits of Earth and Mars, however, are Amors. Amor I asteroids that do cross the orbit of Mars (e.g., 433 Eros), do so from the ""inside."" Amor I asteroids with semi-major axes close to Earth's (e.g., 1992 JD) can be considered Arjuna asteroids. The Amor II subgroup has a semi-major axis between that of Mars (1.52 AU) and the asteroid belt (2.12 AU). About one third of Amors, including 1221 Amor, belong to this group. These objects have moderate"
"gap (3:1 orbital resonance with Jupiter), a depleted zone that separates the central main belt. It is, however, a non-family asteroid from the main belt's background population when applying the Hierarchical Clustering Method to its proper orbital elements. It orbits the Sun in the inner main-belt at a distance of 2.1–2.8 AU once every 3 years and 9 months (1,384 days). Its orbit has an eccentricity of 0.13 and an inclination of 4° with respect to the ecliptic. The body's observation arc begins with a precovery taken at Palomar Observatory in June 1954, more than 31 years prior to its"