Masses of the Main Asteroid Belt and the Kuiper Belt from the Motions of Planets and Spacecraft

Understand

Dynamical mass estimates for the main asteroid belt and the trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt have been found from their gravitational influence on the motion of planets.

• Discrete rotating models consisting of moving material points have been used to model the total attraction from small or as yet undetected bodies of the belts.
• The masses of the model belts have been included in the set of parameters being refined and determined and have been obtained by processing more than 800 thousand modern positional observations of planets and spacecraft.
• We have processed the observations and determined the parameters based on the new EPM2017 version of the IAA RAS planetary ephemerides.