Asteroids are found between the orbits of

JPL/NASA (NEW YORK) — A “potentially dangerous” asteroid the size of a bridge is expected to pass by Earth Monday, NASA said. The asteroid — called 1994 XD — has a span of 1,500 feet, comparable to that of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, according to the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It even has its own satellite that circles it, which was discovered in 2005. There is currently no danger of the asteroid hitting Earth, with the object passing the planet at a distance of about 1.9 million miles. That’s roughly eight times the average distance between Earth and the moon but also about 20 times closer than Venus gets at its nearest to Earth. Although it’s common for asteroids to make relatively close approaches, this is one of the bigger asteroids to do so. Because of its size, NASA has classified it as a “potentially hazardous object.” 1994 XD might be hard to see with the naked eye because it will be passing Earth at roughly 48,000 miles per hour, according to NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies. Near-Earth objects are entities such as asteroids and comets that orbit the sun like the planets do. This asteroid orbits the planet every 1,310 days, roughly equivalent to about three-and-a-half years. The asteroid has made several close approaches to Earth in the past and is expected to make at least three more over the next three decades, according to spacereference.org. 1994 XD is not the only asteroid that will pass Earth this week. Two other asteroids...

Artist’s concept of our solar system from the sun to the 5th planet, Jupiter. In this illustration, the asteroid belt is the white donut-shaped cloud. Image via Meet the asteroid belt, a place in our solar system where small bodies – mostly rocky and some metallic – orbit the sun. Sometimes scientists call these little worlds minor planets. One ( The word asteroid means starlike. Asteroids got this name because, when astronomers first discovered them in the early 1800s, they thought they looked like stars. And yet their movement was separate from stars. Because they are closer to us, they move against the starry backdrop. This showed asteroids to be something other than stars. Asteroids by the millions While the graphic may make it seem like the asteroid belt is teeming with debris, if you lumped all the material together it would only create a body smaller than Earth’s moon. The asteroid belt contains objects that vary wildly in size. It has 1 to 2 million asteroids more than half a mile (about a km) across. Plus, the asteroid belt contains untold millions of smaller ones, some probably no bigger than pebbles. In 1801, the astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi discovered the first asteroid, which is also the biggest object in the asteroid belt. It is Distances in the asteroid belt Outer space is vast. And thus, despite there being many millions (possibly billions) of objects in the asteroid belt, the average distance between them is 600,000 miles (about 1 million km). This means tha...

The correct answer is Mars and Jupiter. Key Points • Asteroids are rocky, airless remnants left over from the early formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. • Asteroids are sometimes called minor planets. • Most asteroids are found orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter within the main asteroid belt. • The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System located between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. • Asteroids range in size from Vesta- the largest at about 53o kilometers in diameter - to bodies that are less than 10 meters across. Thus, we can say that asteroids are found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.