Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
36 Atalante is a large, dark main-belt asteroid.It was discovered by the German-French astronomer H. Goldschmidt on October 5, 1855, and named by French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier after the Greek mythological heroine Atalanta (of which Atalante is the French and German form, pronounced nearly the same as 'Atalanta' in English). [7]
The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, ... of water vapor on Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. [36] ...
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 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.
Vesta (radius 262.7 ± 0.1 km), the second-largest asteroid, appears to have a differentiated interior and therefore likely was once a dwarf planet, but it is no longer very round today. [74] Pallas (radius 255.5 ± 2 km ), the third-largest asteroid, appears never to have completed differentiation and likewise has an irregular shape.
1564 Srbija (IPA:), provisional designation 1936 TB, is a dark asteroid from the outer region of the asteroid belt, approximately 36 kilometers in diameter.It was discovered on 15 October 1936, by Serbian astronomer Milorad Protić at the Belgrade Astronomical Observatory in Serbia. [12]
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.
This object was discovered on 29 August 2005 by the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program at Palomar Observatory. [1] It orbits in the outer main asteroid belt [7] with an orbital period of 5.36 years, a semi-major axis of 3.06 AU, and an orbital eccentricity of 0.225, bringing it as close as 2.37 AU to the Sun at perihelion.