Asteroids are known as planetoids or minor planets which are prehistoric fragments left from the formation of the solar system. Most asteroids orbit around the sun in the “Asteroid Belt” which is between Mars and Jupiter. A lot of asteroids that we have discovered are very dark and made of stone, but there are shiny ones that are made of nickel and iron. Most big asteroids are ball shaped. Smaller asteroids, which are usually broken off of a larger asteroid, come in a lot of different shapes. All asteroids have craters that form when they bump or crash into many other asteroids. Though, any asteroid can be anywhere from a few feet to several kilometers in diameter. They can even range in size down to pebbles. Though, more than 70000 asteroids have been discovered in the asteroid belt, where inner and outer planets of asteroids are found orbiting the sun. The process of discovering the asteroid belt began in the 1700s. The first asteroid was discovered in 1801 by astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi named Cere. Ceres is the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, which could almost cover an entire area of Alaska. Ceres is 578 miles across, and is the only dwarf planet in the belt. Though, the main belt extends from 255 to 600 million km from the Sun and may contain over a million objects bigger than 1 km across. It contains the four largest objects: Ceres, Vesta, Pallas and Hygeia. Though, only one such asteroid, Vesta, survives to this day. Though, one of the things I learned about asteroids on this project is that some have moons. On 1993 in August, the space probe Galileo flew past an asteroid. The name of the asteroid was called Ida. It took a while to capture a few close pictures and scientists looked at the pictures and discovered that there was a moon orbiting around Ida. The scientists named this moon