Why is the asteroid belt important

The solar system contains many different types of asteroids, grouped by the minerals they contain. The abundances of precious metals such as nickel, iron, and titanium to name a few , and water make asteroids an attractive target for mining operations when humans decide to expand their presence through interplanetary space. For example, water from asteroids could serve colonies in space, while the minerals and metals would be used to build habitats and grow food for future space colony inhabitants.

Beginning , companies interested in asteroid mining began announcing their plans for future operations on distant planetoids. In addition, NASA is looking into similar missions. The biggest obstacles to asteroid mining are the need to develop affordable spaceflight technology that would allow humans to get to the asteroids of interest.

Skip to content. Asteroid Belt Illustration — laurinemoreau. Asteroid Belt objects are made of rock and stone.

The Asteroid Belt contains billions and billions of asteroids. The largest is the dwarf planet Ceres. Ceres is the only dwarf planet in the asteroid belt. The four largest objects in the belt are Ceres, Vesta, Pallas and Hygiea. Many people picture the belt crowded with asteroids. However this is not the case. The asteroid belt is so vast that the objects are widely spread out, in fact spacecraft have managed to easily travel through the belt without collision.

However this theory is now accepted to be untrue and it is thought the asteroids were never part of a planet. Gravitational forces can throw asteroids out of the belt and send them towards the inner solar system. Asteroids are similar to comets but lack the coma which appears as a tail. Sometimes the asteroid belt is called the main belt to help differentiate between other groups of asteroids in the solar system.

Iron oxide is prevalent in Mars' surface resulting in its reddish color and its nickname "The Red Planet. At the time when the giant planets in our solar system were forming, the region just beyond the snow line contained a dense mix of ices, rock and metals that provided enough material to build giant planets like Jupiter.

When Jupiter formed just beyond the snow line, its powerful gravity prevented nearby material inside its orbit from coalescing and building planets. These fragmented rocks settled into an asteroid belt around the sun. If, on the other hand, a large planet did not migrate at all, that, too, is not good because the asteroid belt would be too massive. There would be so much bombardment from asteroids that life may never evolve. Today, the asteroid belt contains less than one percent of its original mass.

Using our solar system as a model, Martin and Livio proposed that asteroid belts in other solar systems would always be located approximately at the snow line. To test their proposal, Martin and Livio created models of protoplanetary disks around young stars and calculated the location of the snow line in those disks based on the mass of the central star. The temperature of the warm dust was consistent with that of the snow line. The duo then studied observations of the giant planets found outside our solar system.

Only 19 of them reside outside the snow line, suggesting that most of the giant planets that may have formed outside the snow line have migrated too far inward to preserve the kind of slightly-dispersed asteroid belt needed to foster enhanced evolution of life on an Earth-like planet near the belt. Apparently, less than four percent of the observed systems may actually harbor such a compact asteroid belt.

If the Jupiter was still in a further inside orbit, then it would have been a binary star system, throwing all the debris around themselves in a big asteroid belt.