NASA has a really nifty solar system explorer that lives inside of every single web page describing their various missions.

eyes.nasa.gov/apps/orrery/#/sc

Ah, that's the cut-down web version. Here's the link for the whole thing: eyes.nasa.gov

Chock full of live data from space, wow.

Damn. I always envisioned the asteroid belt as something more... discrete. Look at this map of every known asteroid. What a messy cloud. Just a giant whorl of matter swirling in space.

@anthracite

Shoot, and it looks like *most* of it is inside the orbit of Mars. That doesn't fit image they always gave us of a belt between Mars and Jupiter at all.

@Cerulean @anthracite Anything inside the orbit of Mars we pay a lot more attention to, classifying them as a Near Earth Object, since that's a potential impact. There's more _mass_ out in the Belt, but there are tons of objects everywhere - Earth has asteroids in its Lagrange 4 and 5 points, so does Mars, so there's a lot of miscellaneous stuff leading and following us.

But also, when the idea of the Belt was getting proposed, we could only see the big ones, and they're further out. :D

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