Arthur Hunter, age 12, of Bennington, TX  for his question:

How were the asteroids discovered?

In the year 1781, the world was agog at the discovery of a new planet. Uranus had been spotted in the telescopes and recognized as a member of our Solar System. Before the cries of welcome had died down, the scientists had calculated that there might be. still another planet beyond the orbit of the new neighbor.

Attention was then turned to an old table which charted the distance s, from the sun, of the known planets. There seemed a pattern in these distances and the newly discovered Uranus fell right into its proper place. The table of calculations was called Bodes Law.

However, one thing was amiss according to Bode 's Law. For the figures to work out, there should be a planet between Mars and giant Jupiter. So, the skies were then scanned in hopes of finding such a planet. No heavenly body large enough to be called a planet appeared in the probing telescopes. But it was this probing which lead to the discovery of the asteroids    that collection of tiny bodies revolving in orbits mostly between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The first was spotted on January 1, 1801 by the astronomer Piazza from his telescope on the Island of Sicily. He named the planetoid, little planet, Ceres and lost sight of it. A young German mathemati¬cian named Gauss then set to work to calculate the orbit of the new neighbor. Has figures were used to trace its path in the sky and on December 31 of the year 1801 the first discovered asteroid was redis¬covered.

Further calculations showed that the planetoid was only 488 miles in diameter. The German scientist, 01bers, thought that Ceres might be only one of a group of small bodies. He was right, In 1802 he discovered Pallas, no more than 302 miles in diameter, and in 1807 he discovered Vesta, only 21.8 miles in diameter. In the meantime another asteroid had been discovered and named Juno.

Ceres, Dallas, Juno and Vesta are the only sizable asteroids so far discovered. However, some 1,500 smaller bodies have since been found, and named, in the asteroid belt. At first the names were chosen from the females of Greek mythology, but these names were soon used up. Heroines from Shakespeare and Wagner have all but been used up also. Twelve asteroids have been named for Trojan heroes.

All the asteroids, big and little, travel round the sun in the same direction as the earth and planets. Hildago has the largest orbit and at times crosses the orbit of Saturn. Eros, a small body which revolves in five hours, came within 16 million miles of the earth in 1931. Hermes, no more than a mile in diameter, at times comes within the orbit of Venus. In 1938, it came within 05,000 miles of the earth. And, since at times it comes within 220,000 miles of the earth's orbit, it could possibly come closer to us than even the moon,