We have all probably stumbled upon a movie, or a video game, emphasising that great skill is needed to navigate through the asteroid belt’s supposed high concentration of asteroids. The asteroid belt has long been depicted as a densely populated region of differently sized, irregularly shaped rocks flying and tumbling in all directions with the possibility of colliding at any second.

There are over a million estimated asteroids in our solar system’s asteroid belt

However, scenes of spacecraft flying through such dense regions of asteroids, dodging one asteroid only to encounter another space rock the next second, are strictly confined to science fiction.

In fact, most of the asteroid belt, lying between Mars and Jupiter, is composed of empty space.

Although there are over a million estimated asteroids in our solar system’s asteroid belt, these are distributed over an immensely large region.

In fact, the average distance between individual asteroids is around 5-10 million kilometres, which equates to around 15-30 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Not that dense after all!