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Main Asteroid Belt: The majority of known asteroids orbit within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, generally with not very elongated orbits. The belt is estimated to contain between 1.1 and 1.9 million asteroids larger than 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter, and millions of smaller ones.
ASTEROID BELT -- NASA's Dawn spacecraft re-entered our solar system's asteroid belt today, Nov. 13, and this time it will stay there. Dawn first entered the belt (whose lower boundary may be defined as the greatest distance Mars gets from the sun (249,230,000 kilometers, or 154,864,000 miles) in June 2008.
The main asteroid belt is a region in our solar system between Mars and Jupiter, containing millions of asteroids. While we may normally think of asteroids as pieces of rocky solar system debris, they’re actually far more interesting.
The Kuiper Belt represents an enormous, donut-shaped volume of space in the outer solar system. While there are many icy bodies in this region that we broadly refer to as Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) or trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), they're fairly diverse in size, shape, and color.
Our solar system’s small bodies – asteroids, comets, and meteors – pack big surprises. These chunks of rock, ice, and metal are leftovers from the formation of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago. They are a lot like a fossil record of our early solar system.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft, currently en route to Saturn, has successfully completed its passage through our solar system's asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft has gone silent, ending a historic mission that studied time capsules from the solar system's earliest chapter. Dawn missed scheduled communications sessions with NASA's Deep Space Network on Wednesday, Oct. 31, and Thursday, Nov. 1.
Dwarf planet Haumea is a member of a group of objects that orbit in a disc-like zone beyond the orbit of Neptune called the Kuiper Belt. This distant realm is populated with thousands of miniature icy worlds which formed early in the history of our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago.
For more than 25 years, Pioneer 10 was the most distant human-made object, breaking records by crossing the asteroid belt, the orbit of Jupiter, and eventually even the orbit of Pluto. Voyager 1, moving even faster, claimed the most distant title in February 1998 and still holds that crown.
During its decade-long journey, Dawn has observed planet-like worlds Vesta and Ceres, collecting detailed data about the two fascinating bodies in the main asteroid belt. Initial data from ground-based telescopes and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope provided some information about what we might find at the two bodies, though they had never been ...