Asteroid Belt Earth Live WP

A dark blanket, contrasting with blacks and yellows, and the occasional white...

A dark blanket, contrasting with blacks and yellows, and the occasional white, which is shaped as a circle and sometimes a crescent. There are stars which dot the blanket in a intricate pattern. This is space.

Asteroid Mining

The solar system contains many different types of asteroids, grouped by the minerals they contain. The abundances of precious metals such as nickel, iron, and titanium (to name a few), and water make asteroids an attractive target for mining operations when humans decide to expand their presence through interplanetary space. For example, water from asteroids could serve colonies in space, while the minerals and metals would be used to build habitats and grow food for future space colony inhabitants. Beginning 2013, companies interested in asteroid mining began announcing their plans for future operations on distant planetoids. In addition, NASA is looking into similar missions. The biggest obstacles to asteroid mining are the need to develop affordable spaceflight technology that would allow humans to get to the asteroids of interest.

Asteroid Vesta

Asteroids

Asteroids are small, rocky solar system bodies that populate interplanetary space out to the orbit of Jupiter. There are millions of them, and they are often grouped by their composition. The planetary …Read more

Facts About The Asteroid Belt

What other fascinating things do we know about the Asteroid Belt?

Asteroid Belt objects are made of rock and stone. Some are solid objects, while others are orbiting “rubble piles”.

The Asteroid Belt contains billions and billions of asteroids.

Some asteroids in the Belt are quite large, but most range in size down to pebbles.

The asteroid 1/Ceres is also designated as a dwarf planet, the largest one in the inner solar system.

We know of at least 7,000 asteroids.

The Asteroid Belt may contain many objects, but they are spread out over a huge area of space. This has allowed spacecraft to move through this region without hitting anything.

Asteroids get their names from suggestions by their discoverers and are also given a number.

The formation of Jupiter disrupted the formation of any worlds in the Asteroid Belt region by scattering asteroids away. This caused them to collide and break into smaller pieces.

Gravitational influences can move asteroids out of the Belt.

The Asteroid Belt is often referred to as the “Main Belt” to distinguish it from other groups of asteroids such as the Lagrangians and Centaurs.

What is the asteroid belt?

The asteroid belt is a region of space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter where most of the asteroids in our Solar System are found orbiting the Sun. The asteroid belt probably contains millions of asteroids. Astronomers think that the asteroid belt is made up of material that was never able to form into a planet, or of the remains of a planet which broke apart a very long time ago. The asteroids in the asteroid belt come in a variety of sizes. Some are very small (less than a mile across), while others are quite large. The largest asteroid is called Ceres. It is about one-quarter the size of our moon. It is a dwarf planet.

It was 2029 and the Apophis asteroid was due to pass earth. NASA kept tabs on it's trajectory, a green blip on a black screen. One moment it was on a path to pass causing no harm, the next it was heading right for Earth at increased velocity. The control room rebooted the system, obviously there was an error, but then the satellites picked it up too...

The asteroid hit earth with enough force to send the oceans into space, leaving our home-world obliterated worse than we ever achieved. We had saved our mother earth from our own greed only to see her destroyed by a rock too large for us to stop. I think it was then that we took living in an augmented reality seriously - a chance to live on Earth again like she was in her hey-day.