The first asteroid was Ceres, discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801.
There are currently over 600,000 known asteroids in our solar system.
Most asteroids are found orbiting in the Asteroid Belt, a series of rings located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
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They are made up of oxygen and silicon, the number one and number two most abundant elements in the Earth's crust. The metallic asteroids are composed of up to 80 palladium, platinum, gold, magnesium and other precious metals such as osmium, ruthenium and rhodium.% iron and 20% a mixture of nickel, iridium,
What Do Asteroids Look Like? In October, 1991, the first close-up views of the asteroid Gaspra were taken by the Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter. Gaspra is an irregularly shaped body 19 by 12 by 11 kilometers (12 by 7.5 by 7 miles) whose rocky surface is covered with impact craters
