Did you know that the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is mostly empty space - so empty that every spacecraft we have ever sent through it has passed safely without hitting a single rock? That meteorites falling to Earth carry amino acids, the building blocks of life, that formed in space billions of years ago? That in September 2022, humanity deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid and successfully changed its orbit for the first time in history? And that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid impact - but that same impact may have eventually led to the rise of humans?

Inside this book, readers will discover: The Real Asteroid Belt - Why the densely packed asteroid fields of science fiction movies are completely wrong, how empty the real belt actually is, and why it still matters enormously as a scientific treasure chest from the solar system's earliest history Ceres: The Dwarf Planet - The largest object in the asteroid belt and the only dwarf planet in the inner solar system, revealed by NASA's Dawn spacecraft to have mysterious bright spots of sodium carbonate salt, evidence of a subsurface ocean, and a cryovolcanic dome that formed within the past 200 million years Vesta: A Planetary Embryo - The second largest asteroid, a differentiated world with an iron core, a basaltic crust, and two enormous ancient impact craters covering most of its southern hemisphere, connected to the HED meteorites that rain down on Earth How the Belt Formed - Why no planet ever formed between Mars and Jupiter, the role of Jupiter's gravity in disrupting planet formation, the dramatic Grand Tack hypothesis in which Jupiter migrated inward through the solar system and back, and how this migration may have delivered Earth's water Near-Earth Asteroids - The thousands of asteroids with orbits that bring them close to Earth, how they escape from the main belt through gravitational resonances, and the famous Apophis asteroid whose discovery briefly suggested a 2.7 percent chance of hitting Earth in 2029

Meteorites - How pieces of asteroids travel from the belt to Earth over millions of years, the different types of meteorites and what they reveal about their parent bodies, why Antarctica is the best place on Earth to find meteorites, and what the amino acids in carbonaceous chondrites tell us about the origin of life Asteroid Mining - The staggering mineral wealth contained in metallic asteroids, why water is actually the most immediately valuable asteroid resource for space exploration, the technical challenges of mining in near-zero gravity, and the commercial companies and government programs already developing plans for asteroid resource utilization

Every chapter ends with a Did You Know? feature packed with extraordinary facts, and the book includes a comprehensive 31-term glossary of asteroid and planetary science vocabulary.

Perfect for: Middle grade students ages 8 to 12 in grades 3 through 7. School science projects and reports on asteroids, the solar system, space exploration, planetary defense, and the origin of life. Teachers and homeschool educators. Science fair projects. Any young reader fascinated by space rocks, ancient catastrophes, and humanity's plan to defend Earth from asteroid impacts.

The rocky middle ground of the solar system shaped Earth's past and may determine its future. This book tells the complete story.