The Asteroid Belt

In a region referred to as the “main belt,” between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter lies the Asteroid Belt, which is populated by a vast number of irregularly shaped asteroids and minor planets—a region that plays a significant role in our current understanding of the early solar system and the formation of the planets. Believed to have formed some 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was nothing more than a massive cloud of gas and dust, which gradually formed into the Sun and the planets thanks to multiple gravitational fields that attracted smaller objects into massive spheres of varying size. In the case of the asteroid belt, however, Jupiter’s strong gravitational influence prevented many astroids from amassing into planets, leaving behind a boneyard of debris that generally orbits the Sun in the same direction as the planets.

While there are a good number of lesser asteroid types, the three main compositional groups include C-type asteroids rich in carbon, which accounts for 75% of all asteroids, S-type asteroids composed of silicate materials and nickel-iron, and M-type asteroids composed mainly of metallic iron and nickel. While science fiction artists have frequently depicted the asteroid belt as a densely packed debris field, in truth the total amount of objects in the main belt is estimated to be four percent of the Moon’s mass, which allowed NASA’s Dawn mission to the asteroid belt to safely navigate through the boneyard for a close encounter with two of the largest dwarf planets in the belt, Vesta and Ceres, the later comprising a radius of 296 miles or approximately 1/13th the radius of Earth.

While studying the asteroid belt has allowed scientists to better understand the conditions and materials present during a time when the solar system began to form—including signs of past volcanic activity and the presence of water and potentially organic molecules that point to the origins of life, the asteroid belt may provide potential resources for future space exploration, including materials for construction in space and water, which is a necessary resource for the production of oxygen and hydrogen-based fuels. Now that a second space race has begun in earnest, thanks to superpowers, billionaire visionaries and a renewed interest in returning to the Moon and traveling to Mars, the commercial space industry is currently a $546 billion market, with projections to grow to a $1.1 trillion market by 2030, which may lead to mining trips to the asteroid belt, which are rich in veins of gold, zinc, platinum and other valuable metals, making the asteroid belt, a vital crossroads into both the past and the future.