23 June 2025

Counting asteroids


I'll never forget the moment Carl Sagan described the number of stars as being greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth.  This video provides an equivalent perspective on the number of asteroids in the asteroid belt.  The successive zoom-outs are impressive, but especially the final image showing how little of the belt was sampled for the data.

1 comment:

  1. And it's amazing to me that the space the asteroid belt covers is so large and spread out that we don't need to worry about them when sending spacecraft to the outer planets.

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