A Map Of The Asteroid Belt By Taxonomic Class, Mass, Distance, And Size

International audienceThe distribution of asteroids across the Main Belt has been studied for decades to understand the current compositional distribution and what that tells us about the formation and evolution of our solar system. In this work, we reexamine the architecture of the asteroid belt by determining the bias-corrected distribution of 99.99% of its mass based on compositional information provided by ground-based and space-based measurements. The main belt's most massive classes are C, B, P, V and S in decreasing order. Excluding the four most massive asteroids, (1) Ceres, (2) Pallas, (4) Vesta and (10) Hygiea that heavily skew the values, primitive material (C-, P-types) account for more than half main-belt and Trojan asteroids by mass, most of the remaining mass being in the S-types. All the other classes are minor contributors to the material between Mars and Jupiter. Additionally, we present the taxonomic distribution of asteroids as a function of size. The relative mass contribution of each class changes as a function of size in each region of the Main Belt. We report an updated view of the distribution of asteroid compositions according to distance and size