i have been working on tweaking the system types for a mod i am putting together, and got to wondering what real asteroid fields look like. I honestly had no idea of the scale of what our asteroid belt was, and just had this vague imagining of what it might be like.
i only knew a few things, like all the probes we have sent past the asteroid belt have needed no guidance or collision avoidance programming, and that its not dense enough to require any sort of worry for most things passing through. I also knew that it accounts for a large amount of mass, and that many (most) of the objects are still uncharted.
today, i found this great plot of objects in the inner solar system (inside jupiter) linked to on slashdot. the asteroid belt is alot bigger than i thought, as far as the distance it covers. it looks like larger chunks extend into the orbits of venus and mercury, while smaller objects spread out from just outside of the martian orbit and extend half way to the jovian orbit.
I had also never heard of jovian trojans before (and no, they are not a new kind of contraceptive), although they are probably well known to anyone who is familiar with astronomy.
check it out:
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/InnerPlot.html
system maps, scale, and such
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