Where is the asteroid belt located

The total mass of all the asteroids combined is less than that of Earth's Moon. Go farther. Key Science Targets. The total mass of all the asteroids in the main asteroid belt combined is less than that of Earth's Moon.

Asteroids are small, rocky objects that orbit the Sun. Although asteroids orbit the Sun like planets, they are much smaller than planets. There are lots of asteroids in our solar system. Most of them are located in the main asteroid belt — a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Some asteroids go in front of and behind Jupiter. These are called Trojan asteroids. The Kuiper Belt is a doughnut-shaped ring of icy objects around the Sun, extending just beyond the orbit of Neptune from about 30 to 55 AU.

Short-period comets which take less than years to orbit the Sun originate in the Kuiper Belt. There may be hundreds of thousands of icy bodies larger than km 62 miles and an estimated trillion or more comets within the Kuiper Belt.

Some dwarf planets within the Kuiper Belt have thin atmospheres that collapse when their orbit carries them farthest from the Sun. The first mission to explore the Kuiper Belt is New Horizons. It flew past Pluto in and is on its way to explore another Kuiper Belt world.

It is not clear if worlds in this distant, cold region are not capable of supporting life as we know it. Astronomers are searching for a possible planet that might explain the strange orbits of several Kuiper Belt Objects. The nickname: Planet 9. The inner, main region of the Kuiper belt ends around 50 AU from the Sun. Overlapping the outer edge of the main part of the Kuiper Belt is a second region called the scattered disk, which continues outward to nearly 1, AU, with some bodies on orbits that go even farther beyond.

Astronomers think the icy objects of the Kuiper Belt are remnants left over from the formation of the solar system. Similar to the relationship between the main asteroid belt and Jupiter, it's a region of objects that might have come together to form a planet had Neptune not been there.

Instead, Neptune's gravity stirred up this region of space so much that the small, icy objects there weren't able to coalesce into a large planet. We call it the Kuiper Belt. There are bits of rock and ice, comets and dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt. They are dwarf planets like Pluto. Kuiper Belt. There are hundreds of thousands of asteroids in the asteroid belt, but almost half of the entire mass is made up of just four objects.

These objects are the dwarf planet Ceres, and three other asteroids called Vesta, Pallas and Hygiea. The diameters of Vesta, Pallas and Hygiea are over km and Ceres is even bigger at km diameter. Apart from these four objects, the remaining objects in the asteroid belt range in size from small rocks right down to dust particles. The asteroid belt is between the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is located about 2. That is somewhere between million km away. The asteroid belt is huge and the space between each of the asteroids is over , miles.

The circumference of Earth is only 24, Asteroid Belt Facts Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the asteroid belt contains an estimated 1.