🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE The asteroid belt is a ring of debris that exists between Mars and Jupiter. What caused it to form — and will it ever become a planet?
Just outside the orbit of Mars sits our Sun’s premier collection of space rocks. The asteroid belt has captivated the imaginations of science fiction authors and scientists alike who have considered the possibilities of mining ore, water and other material from the region to boost further space exploration.
“This is the cool place in our solar system where all the small bodies go,” says William Bottke, director of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute, a nonprofit research and development organization headquartered in San Antonio, Texas.. Planets were still forming, throwing their neighbor’s orbits out of whack in the process.
is the single largest asteroid in the belt, roughly the size of Australia with a mass nearly half that of all the material of the belt, according to Raymond.Just because the asteroid belt doesn’t represent the leftovers of a former planet doesn’t mean scientists have abandoned the idea entirely. The belt might have come from parts of other planets that still exist, or be part of a planetesimal — which is like a baby planet — that never completely formed before being smashed apart.
“The solar system of today looks very different from the way it looked 4.5 billion years ago,” Bottke says.We now know the asteroid belt doesn’t contain material from a single source. Some of its components may have been derived from the general region of space it currently inhabits. Other material may have come from sources beyond the orbit of Jupiter, Bottke says. Still other asteroids may have arrived from the inner-planets zone, as bits that broke off at some point.
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