In sci-fi movies, spaceships flying through asteroid belts are shown dodging between huge floating boulders. Is our asteroid belt really like that? Or, if you were on one of the asteroids would you even be able to see the other asteroids? If you could see other asteroids, would you see them as big rocks, or would they be so far away you would only see little star-like lights?
I've never heard of anyone from NASA saying anything about space-probes going to the outer planets being in danger when flying through the asteroid belt. So, I figured that the sci-fi scenes were probably over-dramatizations.
Also, I've read that the asteroid, (now supposedly a dwarf-planet), Ceres contains like 30-40% of the asteroid belt's mass. Since the asteroid belt covers such a huge area, it seemed like, if so much of the mass was concentrated in Ceres, the rest of the asteroid belt must be pretty sparsely populated.
2007-06-22
02:29:37
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7 answers
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asked by
Azure Z
6
in
Astronomy & Space