What are asteroids, you may be asking. They are large pieces of rock left over from the making of the solar system. That took place about 4.5 billion years ago. Most of these pieces of ancient rubble, sometimes referred to by scientist as minor planets or plantoids, can be found circling the sun in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. This area in our solar system is called the Asteroid Belt or the Main Belt. This belt contains thousands of asteroids thrashing through it. Asteroids range widely in size from a small body that is less than 1 km across to bodies that are as big as 1/4 of the moon.

Asteroids look like giant potatoes, filled with caters and fractures. There very odd looking objects. Revolving around the Sun in a oval orbit, they occasionally have very close encounter with a planet or another asteroid. That near collision changes the asteroid's orbit, knocking it out of the Main Belt and throwing it into the orbits of other planets. Scientist believe this may be what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

In the 1800's asteroids were first observed with telescopes by astronomers. In 1802 William Herschel first used the word "asteroid", which means star like in Greek, to describe these large rocks. in the past 200 years most of our information has been discovered with telescopes.