asteroid belt
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Beyond the Planets: The Quirky Underdogs of the Solar System
The Sun is orbited by eight planets, at least five dwarf planets, tens of thousands of asteroids, and around three trillion comets and icy bodies. Although not all objects of the solar system are as well known as Earth, Jupiter, or other celestial bodies with main character energy, they still make up a valuable part…
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Seeing Double: Lucy’s First Target Asteroid Has a Tiny Moon
As NASA’s Lucy spacecraft zoomed past its first asteroid on Wednesday, its mission scientists made a surprising discovery of a bonus space rock. The first images sent over by the Lucy mission of its brief rendezvous with the main asteroid belt revealed a binary pair, with a tiny satellite closely orbiting Dinkinesh, NASA announced on…
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What to Know About NASA’s Unprecedented Psyche Mission to a Metallic Asteroid
Wedged between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the main asteroid belt contains over 1 million rocky objects, but perhaps few of them are as intriguing as Psyche. The metal-rich asteroid might have once been an ancient planetary building block that was stripped of its outer rocky shell as our solar system came to be.…
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Astronomers Spot Two Unusually Red Objects in the Asteroid Belt
They’re red, they’re reasonably big, and they have no business being in the main asteroid belt, but their discovery confirms the complex conditions in place when the solar system was still forming.