Asteroid collisions
What happens when one asteroid impacts another?
This image of P/2010 A2 (now 354P/LINEAR) was snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope in January 2010 – the first asteroid collision to be directly observed
© NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (University of California, Los Angeles)
© NASA
Throughout the Solar System there are potentially millions of asteroids – rocks left over from the formation of the Solar System some 4.6 billion years ago – just waiting to be discovered. Some will have been ejected from a planet following a collision, such as the Pluto-sized object believed to have crashed into Mars early in its formation. Others are the remnants of failed planetary formation, often unsuccessful due to the effects of a nearby body. One culprit, Jupiter, prevented the formation of another planet between itself and Mars, leaving the asteroid belt.