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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 .
The belts are named after James Van Allen, who published an article describing the belts in 1958. [1] [2] Earth's two main belts extend from an altitude of about 640 to 58,000 km (400 to 36,040 mi) [3] above the surface, in which region radiation levels vary. The belts are in the inner region of Earth's magnetic field.
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]
Phaeton (alternatively Phaethon / ˈ f eɪ. ə θ ən / or Phaëton / ˈ f eɪ. ə t ən /; from Ancient Greek: Φαέθων, romanized: Phaéthōn, pronounced [pʰa.é.tʰɔːn]) is a hypothetical planet hypothesized by the Titius–Bode law to have existed between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the destruction of which supposedly led to the formation of the asteroid belt (including the ...
The asteroid belt occupies a torus-shaped region between 2.3 and 3.3 AU from the Sun, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It is thought to be remnants from the Solar System's formation that failed to coalesce because of the gravitational interference of Jupiter. [140]
An asteroid that orbited near Earth for a few months as a mini-moon may be a chunk of the ... While the space rocks largely originate from the main asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter ...
A human mission to Mars, tens of millions of miles or km, is similarly challenging. [14] The Mars rover mission, for example, took 253 days to get to Mars. [14] Russia, China, and the European Space Agency ran an experiment, called MARS-500, between 2007 and 2011 to gauge the physical and psychological limitations of crewed space flight. [15]
The orbital perihelion of these objects is close to, but greater than, the orbital aphelion of Earth (i.e., the objects do not cross Earth's orbit), [1] with most Amors crossing the orbit of Mars. The Amor asteroid 433 Eros was the first asteroid to be orbited and landed upon by a robotic space probe ( NEAR Shoemaker ).