What does the asteroid belt really look like?

Question

This question is for a "rocket scientist". I've seen drawings of the asteroid belt that look like a dense ring around the solar system, but I suspect those are exaggerations. Are there any real photos of the asteroid belt? There should be since the Voyagers and other craft have passed throgh them.

Answer 1

Your suspicions are correct. The asteroid belt essentially looks like empty space. Even the largest asteroids are really tiny, and they are spread through an enormous volume of space. There are no photographs of the asteroid belt because the asteroids are too faint and too far apart. There are lots of photographs of single asteroids traversing a starry background (in fact that's how asteroids are discovered), but the odds of getting even two asteroids in the same field of view are really tiny...I don't think I've ever seen such a photo.

Answer 2

The pictures that you have seen are really not pictures, they are maps. Each dot shows where an asteroid is but the dots are WAY bigger than the asteroids would appear if the belt was small enough to fit in the picture. In reality the asteroids are so small and far apart that you could pass through the middle of the belt and never see an asteroid.

Answer 3

Any true photos are actually quite boring, if I remember right. however, the Voyagers where probably powered down then, to conserve their power supplies for when they really needed them, like when they passed the planets. There aren't a huge amount of asteroids in the belt, not nearly enough to make it look dense. The asteroid belt is actually very very very spacious. The biggest and most exciting thing there is Ceres, the dwarf planet.

Answer 4

There are not any really good photos of the asteroid belt. The belt is so big that, in order to get the whole thing into a camera's field of view, you'd have to be hundreds of millions of miles away from it. At that distance, nearly all of the asteroids would be too dim to see.

Also, in spite of the fact that in contains many thousands of asteroids, the belt is actually almost completely empty space. It's not like Saturn's rings, in which countless particles are confined to a relatively small area. The average distance between asteroids is hundreds of thousands of miles.

The best "picture" of the belt is made by computer simulation. I used the "Starry Night" astronomy software to create a picture of the asteroid belt in reference to the surrounding planets, to give you a rough idea of how the larger asteroids are distributed. It's located here: http://www.incolor.com/rbrown/astro/images/asteroid_belt.jpg

Answer 5

There is not a single belt, there are many seperate belts orbiting between Mars and Jubiter, Two of them are actually in Jupiter's orbit, one leading by 60 degees and the other trailing by 60 degrees, one has been detected outside the orbit of jupiter and some of Jupiters moons are suspected to be captured asteroides. Up to now more than 1600 asteroides have been detected, the largest is Ceres, it is 620 miles in diameter.

Answer 6

It doesn't look like much of anything. It is just a region of space where lots of stray asteroids can be found.

Answer 7

Its a region in space that all of the rocks are there and no spacecraft even took a picture of it.

Answer 8

I haven't been able to come across any real pictures of it, other than artist's interpretation and graphs. Sorry...it'd be cool to see.