At the dawn of the 19th century, a group of European astronomers known as the Celestial Police was searching for a new planet. A popular mathematical formula suggested that a planet should orbit between Mars and Jupiter. On January 1, 1801, Giuseppi Piazzi, the director of the new Palermo Observatory, discovered a star-like point of light in the constellation Taurus. When additional observations on later nights showed that the object had moved compared to the background of stars, indicating that it was close to Earth, Piazzi thought he had found the missing planet, which he named Ceres.

Minor Giant: Ceres

Ceres is only about a quarter of the size of our own Moon. Even so, its gravity was strong enough to form Ceres into a sphere. Heavier materials settled in the middle of the asteroid, while lighter rock rose to the surface. The surface of Ceres consists of dark, carbon-rich rock mixed with a fair amount of water. It is similar to many meteorites that fall to Earth, indicating that they came from the same region of the solar system. A mission to Ceres in the next decade will provide the first close-up look at the giant of the asteroids.

Astronomers have discovered many thousands of these boulders, and with automated searches they are discovering thousands more each year. Most orbit the Sun in a broad region known as the asteroid belt, which is between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

For a long time, astronomers thought that Ceres and the other asteroids were the remnants of a planet that exploded. But today, most believe that the asteroids were prevented from coming together to form a planet by the gravity of nearby Jupiter, which nudged them on each orbit around the Sun.

Asteroids are made of rock and metal. In the largest ones, the decay of radioactive elements heated their interiors, causing their material to "differentiate." In other words, gravity pulled the heavier materials, like iron and nickle, to the centers of these asteroids, while lighter rocks "floated" to the surface, creating a structure that is similar to Earth and the other inner planets.

Ridges, boulders, and craters on the knobby surface of Eros.

Even so, over the life of the solar system, asteroids in the belt have undergone countless collisions, shattering many of them and sending fragments flying throughout the solar system. Collisions and near-collisions also have deflected asteroids from their orbits and sent them spiraling into the inner solar system.

Several thousand of these bodies form a class known as Near-Earth Asteroids because their orbits cross or come close to Earth's orbit around the Sun. As many as 1,000 of them may be at least one kilometer in diameter. If such an asteroid hit Earth, it could wipe out a city, and affect climate around the globe. Asteroids a few times that size could devastate the entire planet.

In fact, there is evidence of several powerful collisions with Earth in the distant past. The most famous occurred 65 million years ago, when an asteroid several miles in diameter hit near present-day Yucatan. The resulting explosion and shock wave, acid rain, and Sun-blocking clouds may have led to the extinction of most species of life on Earth. An even bigger impact 250 million years ago may have produced the largest mass extinction ever recorded.

Despite the threat, asteroids also present opportunities.

Because they are left over from the formation of the solar system, they should hold clues to the composition of the cloud of material that gave birth to Earth and the other planets. And because they are rich in metals -- and perhaps water -- they could provide resources for the exploration and colonization of the solar system.

Exploring these tiny worlds will not be easy, though. Their surface gravity is a tiny fraction of Earth's. With such a weak pull, it requires fairly little energy to escape an asteroid and soar into space; a good fastball would do the trick. Since an astronaut would weigh less on the surface of an asteroid than a baseball does on Earth, every step would send the explorer sailing far above the surface. Astronauts might use small rocketpacks to simply float above the surface of one of these leftover boulders.

See Also

Explorations of Minor Bodies

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This document was last modified: September 13, 2008