Almost everyone has heard of the asteroid belt. This is the place between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter that is home to a very large percentage of the known minor planets in the solar system. Movies love to have space battles in asteroid belts to add to dramatic dogfight scenes. Even the Star Wars universe pays homage to asteroids: in The Empire Strikes Back, C3PO makes a popular statement about the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field. Popular fiction, especially in Hollywood, loves to twist reality for cinematic effect. Often it shows an asteroid belt as an intricate maze of chaotically tumbling boulders that are moving at high speeds relative to each other, requiring advanced evasion techniques to avoid hitting one of them. They are also often shown to collide with each other at high speed, resulting in large explosions. In reality, at least for our asteroid belt, things are not quite so dramatic. If you were actually in our asteroid belt, the chances that you would see an asteroid are fairly small. Most of them are quite small relative to the Earth and the space between them is relatively large. NASA has sent numerous probes through the belt, and not one has had an accidental encounter with an asteroid, although there have been a couple of intentional encounters. We know very little about the physical characteristics of asteroids compared to planets. Very few have been visited. However, their orbital dynamics are well studied and show some pretty amazing features. Let's take a look at a view of all of the asteroids used in Mathematica's AstronomicalData out to the orbit of Jupiter.