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The total mass of the asteroid belt is significantly less than Pluto's, and roughly twice that of Pluto's moon Charon. The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars.
The asteroid and comet belts orbit the Sun from the inner rocky planets into outer parts of the Solar System, interstellar space. [ 16 ] [ 17 ] [ 18 ] An astronomical unit , or AU, is the distance from Earth to the Sun, which is approximately 150 billion meters (93 million miles). [ 19 ]
The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets .
Collisions in the main asteroid belt send rocky fragments flying haphazardly through space, with some of those eventually striking Earth. "While more than 70,000 meteorites are known, only 6% had ...
6 Hebe (/ ˈ h iː b iː /) is a large main-belt asteroid, containing around 0.5% of the mass of the belt.However, due to its apparently high bulk density (greater than that of the Moon), Hebe does not rank among the top twenty asteroids by volume.
Using the moon Phobos to launch spacecraft is energetically favorable and a useful location from which to dispatch missions to main belt asteroids. [21] Mining the asteroid belt from Mars and its moons could help in the Colonization of Mars. [22] [23] [24] A space elevator based on Phobos could reduce the cost of transport.
The total mass of the asteroid belt is estimated to be 2.39 × 10 21 kg, which is just 3% of the mass of the Moon; the mass of the Kuiper Belt and Scattered Disk is over 100 times as large. [48] The four largest objects, Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea, account for maybe 62% of the belt's total mass, with 39% accounted for by Ceres alone.
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