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Next Chapter: Asteroids - How?

Asteroids: Boulders in space

Comets are not the only dangerous objects to us here on Earth. In the following pages we move into the part of the Solar System called the Asteroid Belt where thousands of rocks litter the space between Mars and Jupiter.

What?

Asteroids are simply lumps of rock in Space. Today they mostly reside in a band that circles the Sun called the Asteroid Belt which lies between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter (to be precise, the Asteroid Belt is found between 300 million km and 490 million km from the Sun; to compare, Earth is about 150 million km from the Sun). The biggest asteroid, called Ceres (pronounced seh-rez) is 974 km wide. The smallest asteroids are less than a metre across, and there are millions of them in the Asteroid Belt.

There are even some that lurk outside the Asteroid Belt, floating around the orbits of the planets. Sometimes they come close to the Earth, with the potential to crash into our planet. We call these Near Earth Objects, or NEOs. An asteroid colliding with Earth is thought to have been a major reason why the dinosaurs died off 65 million years ago, but we’ll come onto that later.

Next Chapter: Asteroids - How?