Adjusted for a trip to the Asteroid Belt, so a spacecraft equipped with an EM drive would take an estimated
32.5 days
to reach the Asteroid Belt.
Can we travel to 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 away is the asteroid belt from Earth?
The distance between the Asteroid Belt and Earth varies considerably depending on where we measure to. Based on its average distance from the Sun, the distance between Earth and the closest edge of the Belt can be said to be between 1.2 to 2.2 AUs, or
179.5 and 329 million km (111.5 and 204.43 million mi)
.
How long would it take to get to the 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.
Can the asteroid belt support life?
They suggest that
the location of an asteroid belt relative to a Jupiter-like planet is particularly favorable to life
.
How deep is the asteroid belt?
Where is the asteroid belt located? The Asteroid Belt is located in an area of space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. That places it between 2.2 and 3.2 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun. The belt is
about 1 AU thick
.
How long is a day in Ceres?
Ceres takes
1,682 Earth days
, or 4.6 Earth years, to make one trip around the Sun. As Ceres orbits the Sun, it completes one rotation every 9 hours, making its day length one of the shortest in the solar system. Ceres’ axis of rotation is tilted just 4 degrees with respect to the plane of its orbit around the Sun.
How long does it take to travel from Earth to Ceres?
Russell said that using the Space Launch System, a next-generation rocket NASA hopes to use for solar system missions, it would take
about a year
to get to Ceres. Dawn, by contrast, would take roughly six years on a direct route using its lower-power ion engine.
How long would it take to get to Pluto?
Starting from launch on January 19, 2006, and with a gravity assist from Jupiter along the way, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft took
9 years and 5 months
to get to Pluto, 39 AU from the Sun. It traveled at an average speed of 4.1 AU/year. Deep-space missions can take up to 10 years from development to launch.
Is the asteroid belt a failed planet?
Occasionally people wonder whether the belt was made up of the remains of a destroyed planet, or a world that didn’t quite get started. However, according to NASA,
the total mass of the belt is less than the moon, far too small to weigh in as a planet
.
How long is a day in the asteroid belt?
Days and Years:
For the Earth, this coincides with about 365 days (rotations of the planet), but for other objects in our solar system these numbers are very very different.
One day on Ceres lasts about 9 Earth-hours
, while one day on Venus lasts 243 Earth-days.
How big is the asteroid belt compared to Earth?
The asteroid belt is huge and the space between each of the asteroids is over 600,000 miles. The circumference of Earth is only 24,901.45 miles, which means that the distance between objects in the asteroid belt is
more than 24 times the circumference of Earth
.
How long is a day on Pluto?
Pluto’s day is
6.4 Earth days
long.
How long would it take to walk around Pluto?
354,982 km / 70 km per day =
5071 days
.
Where is Voyager 1 now?
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is currently
over 14.1 billion miles from Earth
. It’s moving at a speed of approximately 38,000 miles per hour and not long ago passed through our solar system’s boundary with interstellar space.
Where else could humans live in the solar system?
“Interestingly, Enceladus resulted as the object with the highest subsurface habitability in the solar system, but too deep for direct exploration.
Mars and Europa
resulted as the best compromise between habitability and accessibility.
Is the asteroid belt in the habitable zone?
These asteroids are flung into the habitable zone
as their orbits are perturbed and made increasingly eccentric by their host stars and a orbiting gas giant planet (ex. a massive planet similar to Jupiter). Over time, the asteroid belt becomes depopulated due to these ejections and mutual collisions between them.
How many planets are in the asteroid belt?
Thus, the aforementioned pattern predicted the semimajor axes of all
eight
planets of the time (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus).
What is the largest body in the asteroid belt?
Dwarf planet Ceres
is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it’s the only dwarf planet located in the inner solar system. It was the first member of the asteroid belt to be discovered when Giuseppe Piazzi spotted it in 1801.
Does the asteroid belt have moons?
Yes, asteroids can have moons
. In 1993 the Galileo spacecraft was the first to identify a moon orbiting an asteroid. The moon, called Dactyl, is just over a kilometre across and is the natural satellite of asteroid 243 Ida, which can be found in the asteroid belt.
What keeps the asteroid belt in place?
They may have never formed a very small planet because of the gravitational pull from of Jupiter (very strong) and Mars (very weak).
The pulling of the two planets
keeps the asteroids separated and circling the Sun in a doughnut shaped area.
How long is a day on Ceres in hours?
A day on Ceres is only
around nine hours
long. With rotating bodies in the solar system, a day is the length of time required for the object to complete one rotation ending with the same point facing the sun at both the beginning end of the day.
Can you walk on Ceres?
Though Ceres is the largest asteroid belt object, its gravity is still only less than 3 percent of Earth’s gravity. Yet,
Ceres is “one of the few asteroids you could probably walk around on
,” Lewicki said.
Can Ceres support life?
Truly its own world,
Ceres has the ability to support life
, however, it also sports some other interesting, earth-like features. The surface of the planet remains geologically active, mainly through means of volcanic activity.
Can we mine Ceres?
On a grander scale, Ceres is considered a possibility
. As the largest body in the asteroid belt, Ceres could become the main base and transport hub for future asteroid mining infrastructure, allowing mineral resources to be transported to Mars, the Moon, and Earth.
Can Ceres hit Earth?
The Dwarf Planet Ceres, usually used to just chilling in the asteroid belt, has been knocked onto a perfect trajectory for planet Earth!
The Dwarf Planet will collide with the Earth in exactly 10 years
. The trajectory of Ceres is perfect so that it will hit the Earth dead center on the equator/prime meridian crossover.
Can Ceres become a planet?
By this definition,
Ceres is not a planet
because it does not dominate its orbit, sharing it as it does with the thousands of other asteroids in the asteroid belt and constituting only about 25% of the belt’s total mass.
