Nowhere CLOSE to what the media has prepared us for…
- FACT: The total mass of all of the rocks in the asteroid belt is just 3% of the mass of our Moon.
- FACT: The average distance between two decent sized asteroids is a few million kilometers - the distance between Earth and Moon is a third of a million kilometers.
FICTION:
Not this:
…or this..
…or this:
…or this:
SORRY. BACK TO FACTS:
The reality is more like:
…only with fewer dots!
If you were slap bang in the middle of the asteroid belt, the largest and brightest things you’d see would be the Sun and Jupiter. The odds of you being able to see a single asteroid with naked eye would be almost zero.
Flying through the asteroid belt is no big deal.
ALTHOUGH:
Science has nothing much to say either way about these: