Asteroids

Asteroids are small celestial bodies, also called planetoids, that orbit the sun. It's thought that they are remnants of planets that did not coalesce into planets. These mini planets have impacted our lives more than any other planet has.

Meteorites are small asteroids that have hit the Earth. These small asteroids light up the sky as they burn in the Earth's atmosphere, giving us the illusion of a falling star. Larger asteroids have been blamed for mass extinctions, but the smaller ones just produce a beautiful show.

The largest area of asteroids in our solar system is the Asteroid Belt. The Asteroid Belt is between the planets Mars and Jupiter and is in the likely place of formation of a planet. A planet did not coalesce from the material and instead thousands of asteroid occupy the area. The largest asteroids formed in the belt are called Gaspra and Ida. Asteroids are found elsewhere in the solar system, outside of the asteroid belt. It is now said that the moons of Pluto are asteroids as well.

Asteroids range in size from the size of a baseball to nearly one third the size of the moon. The largest asteroid in our solar system is Ceres. At last count there were nearly 400,000 discovered asteroid in our solar system. The total mass of all of the asteroids in our solar system is less than half the mass of our moon.

Asteroids figure prominently in future space resource usage. It has been proposed to use asteroids as material for future space colonies. Asteroids are divided into three classes, the carbon, silicate and metallic. Each type contains important resources for building a colony on another planet. Since these materials are expensive to launch into space, a space colony could save money and resources by mining asteroids.

These little planetoids that figured so prominently in our past can now figure prominently in our future.