An Asteroid Pile-up in the Orbit of Mars

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An Asteroid Pile-up in the Orbit of Mars

The orbit of the planet Mars is host to the remains of an ancient collision that created many of its Trojan asteroids, a new study has concluded. It paints a new picture of how these objects came to be and may even hold important lessons for deflecting asteroids on a collision course with our own planet.

The findings are to be presented at the annual Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Denver this week, by Dr. Apostolos Christou, a Research Astronomer at the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, United Kingdom.

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