T. and an expert on the Main Asteroid Belt, points out, the belt could have never hosted a planet large enough to claim Mars as a satellite.
Abell says the best estimates now are that the Russian object was initially a rocky silicate asteroid that almost certainly originated from the main asteroid belt.
Early on, Moskovitz says the entire solar system probably resembled one giant asteroid belt.
Vesta and Ceres are the two most massive objects in the main asteroid belt.
One scientist said it could have been a "random small piece of rock, probably from the asteroid belt".
Although downward-looking diagrams of the Main Asteroid Belt make it look incredibly dense, the region has significant gaps, clumps and clusters.
Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, said scientists believe the object originated in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
They become denizens of the asteroid belt found between Mars and Jupiter until they fall out of orbit, possibly after a collision.
The Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter contains millions of these rocky fragments, the biggest among them measuring one-quarter the size of the Moon.
They are believed to have broken away from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and are our nearest neighbours in space after the Moon.
But astronomers have been unable to figure out how they get from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to the vicinity of the Earth.
It is expected to deliver microscopic samples from Comet Wild-2, which it will swoop near in 2004, as well as interstellar particles captured near the asteroid belt.
It will linger at Vesta, the second most massive object in the asteroid belt, until next summer, when it is scheduled to depart for a larger asteroid called Ceres.
They become denizens of the asteroid belt that's found between Mars and Jupiter until they fall out of orbit, possibly as a result of a collision with another object.
The main source of meteorites, Chinese folklore notwithstanding, is the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a rough-and-tumble region of our solar system in which would-be planets are upset by Jovian gravity.
After a million years or so the influence of these large planets, it was thought, caused the fragments to be ejected from the asteroid belt altogether potentially ending up in an Earth-crossing orbit.
ECONOMIST: Celestial mechanics: A rock in a hard place | The
We have the technology and ability to exploit the resources found on the moon and in the asteroid belt as well as sending a manned mission to Mars to set up a permanent base.
FORBES: Who Says America Is Falling Behind In The Space Race?
The probe, which launched in 2007, reached Vesta a few weeks ago, and will be spending about a year there before it departs on its three year journey to the dwarf planet Ceres, also located in the asteroid belt.
Preliminary mapping data show that Vesta is a world layered in many different rock types and minerals, supporting the notion that it might have become a major planet had it not been trapped in the asteroid belt's powerful gravitational rip tides.
Since most objects in the asteroid belt are primitive, dating back to the beginnings of the solar system, the information they hold their chemistry, and the temperature and pressure under which they were created can be used to understand what conditions were like when the planets formed.
The inner main-belt asteroid 5806 Archieroy was named after Professor Roy shortly after its discovery in 1986.
Critically, the Baptistina family of asteroids - those that were formed when the larger asteroid destructively entered the main belt - were only formed around 80 million years ago.
Scientists believe it would take an asteroid around 10 million years to travel from the main belt to Earth, so "this doesn't give a Baptistina fragment much time to get into a suitable position", said Dr Mainzer.
应用推荐