2 THE ASTEROID BELT IS VERY HAZARDOUS

There’s no doubt that there is a lot of rock in the area of our Solar System that’s known as the asteroid belt. Sitting between Mars and Jupiter, this band of fragments contains over 3,000 minor planets and more than 750,000 separate asteroids measuring more than 1,000 metres (3,280 feet) across. The larger asteroids sometimes collide, spraying smaller fragments into the belt – according to myth, endangering any spacecraft that dares to weave its way through. This myth has been fuelled by science fiction. When

Han Solo takes the Millennium Falcon into an asteroid field in Star

Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, C-3PO warns: “Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to one”. If the Hoth asteroid field is anything like our own, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

In the 1970s, NASA’s Pioneer 10 became the first spacecraft to navigate its way through the asteroid belt. Only a layer of aluminium honeycomb protected the spacecraft, but despite the apparent danger, it made it’s way through with no trouble. Not because of careful evasion, but because the distance between asteroids is huge. On average, there’s a distance of around 970,000 kilometres (600,000 miles) between the asteroids, which is more than twice the distance from Earth to the Moon. When compared to the crowded space imagined in the movies, the asteroid belt is actually relatively empty. A much bigger danger in the asteroid belt is the dust-sized particles that form when asteroids collide. These tiny grains could definitely cause damage to spacecraft, but evading rocks the size of a grain of sand doesn’t make for very good television.

“This band of fragments contains over 3,000 minor planets”