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Can you go under the asteroid belt?
Yes, you could go “over” or “under” the asteroid belt. However, plane changes are expensive, and as pointed out in the comments, the asteroid belt is not very dense (average distance of 600,000 miles [1 million kilometers] between objects) so there isn’t much to avoid.
How far is asteroid belt from Mars?
The asteroid belt is between the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is located about 2.2 to 3.2 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun. That is somewhere between 329-478 million km away. The asteroid belt is huge and the space between each of the asteroids is over 600,000 miles.
How long does it take to get to Kuiper Belt?
The voyage that would have taken you more than 6,000 years in an SUV or 600 years in a jetliner has taken New Horizons a little under a decade. And after Pluto, New Horizons will sail through the Kuiper Belt (an extended ring of planetary construction debris) and out, eventually, toward the stars.
How much is the asteroid belt worth?
Asteroids contain metals worth quintillions of dollars — but mining them won’t necessarily make your richer than Bezos or Musk. Asteroids aren’t just chunks of ice and rock, but storehouses of precious metals. The asteroid belt is estimated to contain $700 quintillion worth of resources.
What is the richest asteroid?
The most valuable asteroid in the belt is Davida. It has a diameter of 326 kilometres and has a resource value of almost $27 quintillion.
What is the rarest asteroid?
16 Psyche
The rare and highly valuable asteroid called ’16 Psyche’ was discovered by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and it is equivalent to ten thousand times the global economy in 2019.
How long would it take for an asteroid to travel around Earth?
An asteroid coming from further out, say 4 AU, would take 1.9762 years. From 2 AU, 0.9184 years. Of course, were one to just give an asteroid a big push it could move nearly arbitrarily fast (up to the lightspeed limit if we want to be absurd) along an Earth-intersecting orbit, but I suspect the question was about normal asteroids.
How far away is the asteroid belt?
The Asteroid Belt lies at a distance of 1.2 to 2.2 AUs from Earth. So how long would it take to send exploration and mining missions there? Image Credit: Johan Swanepoel via Shutterstock / HDR tune by Universal-Sci Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter lies the Solar System’s Main Asteroid Belt.
How long did it take Voyager 1 to reach the asteroid belt?
However, even this pales in comparison to Voyager 1, which was launched on Sept. 5th, 1977 and reached the Asteroid Belt on Dec. 10th, 1977 – a total of 96 days.
How often do asteroid collisions occur in the asteroid belt?
The high population of the asteroid belt makes for a very active environment, where collisions between asteroids occur frequently (on astronomical time scales). Collisions between main-belt bodies with a mean radius of 10 km are expected to occur about once every 10 million years.