Asteroids: Solar System and Asteroids Essay

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Frank Calandra
Space Extra Credit, Asteroids

Our solar system is filled with millions of asteroids. Flying aimlessly around in all different kinds of directions colliding with other asteroids, and planets causing mass destruction with no care in the world. While our planet is caught in the middle of it all, leaving our planet in a battlefield of asteroid defense. Any single asteroid of mass proportion can wipe out thousands years of history, eliminating the whole human race. Asteroids are considered to be minor planets or some people call them dwarf planets or planetoids, which are the larger ones. These asteroids fly around space at speed of up to 80,000 km/h, considered to be formed millions of years ago during the “big bang.” These rocks now float around in orbit around the sun in an asteroid belt approximately 300 million miles away. Majority of asteroids are believed to lie in the asteroid belt between mars and Jupiter. It is home to a large amount of asteroid that range in sizes of dust to dwarf planets like Ceres. It is said that there are more then 200 asteroids larger then 60 miles in diameter, more then 750,000 asteroids leger then 3/5ths of a mile and millions of smaller asteroids. Many asteroids lie outside the main belt. For instance, a number of asteroids called Trojans lie along Jupiter's orbital path. There are also three asteroid groups called Atens, Amors, and Apollos, known as near-Earth asteroids orbit in the inner solar system and sometimes cross the path of Mars and Earth. Asteroids are also considered to be similar to comets but do not have a visible coma like comets do.
Asteroids are made up of a number of things; they are majority made up of different types of metals. Irregular in shape, basically like an airless world orbiting the sun. The asteroids that pass close to the earth are called Near-Earth Orbits or NEOs. For example, the first asteroid ever observed is called Ceres, having a diameter of 940 Kilometers making it large enough to be considered a Dwarf Planet. Ceres is considered to composed of a rocky core covered by an icy mantel while asteroid Vesta is considered to have a nickel-iron core with an olivine mantel, and basaltic crust. Some asteroids even have their own force of gravity enacting some to actually have moons that orbit around them. Asteroid compositions even contain traces of Amino acids, and other organic compounds found on earth. This leaves us to bringing life to earth as we know it. Another characteristic of asteroids are their color, as asteroids age they become darker and redder due to space weathering. This weathering happens usually during the first hundred thousand years, limiting our ability to judge how old an asteroid really is. It wasn’t until the age of space travel that we were able to even see a asteroid, these objects in even the biggest telescopes appeared to be just pinpricks of light leaving the terrain a mystery. Even the Hubble telescope can’t resolve the images of an asteroid, only revealing a small amount of detail, but even these images come out to be just fuzzy blobs. Having this dilemma people use light curves and radar imaging in order to infer the properties, composition, size and shape of an asteroid. It wasn’t till 1991 that we had the first true photograph of an asteroid, which was of 951 Gaspra. Although asteroids could destroy Earth if they come in contact with it, small meteors that hit Earth are found to be great discoveries. These space rocks that hit the earth are of grave danger to the future of the human race. This is why we have developed numbers of ways in which we can maneuver asteroid out of earth’s path. The first way in which people have developed a way to move asteroid out of the path of earth is Kinetic impact vehicle. This kinetic impact vehicle delivers 19 Gigajoules (that's 4.8 tons of TNT) of kinetic energy to the asteroid in order to move it out of its path. This kinetic energy is generated by the
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