Asteroids Trivia
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59 free Asteroids trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Asteroids killed the dinosaurs, cracked windows across Chelyabinsk and were nudged off course on purpose by a NASA spacecraft in 2022. This quiz covers the rocks and the science: how an asteroid differs from a comet and a meteoroid, William Herschel's coinage, Piazzi's discovery of Ceres in 1801, Vesta, Pallas and Hygiea, the C, S and M types, the surprisingly empty main belt and the Kirkwood gaps. It then follows the spacecraft: Galileo's first close-ups of Gaspra and Ida, NEAR Shoemaker's landing on Eros, Dawn at Vesta and Ceres, Hayabusa and Hayabusa2's sample returns, OSIRIS-REx and Bennu, DART and Dimorphos, Lucy and the trojans, Psyche and Tianwen-2, plus the hazards: Chicxulub and the iridium layer, Tunguska, Chelyabinsk, Apophis, the Torino scale and Asteroid Day. Easy questions suit any space fan; the expert tier asks for craters, cubesats and discovery years. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on asteroids, individual bodies and missions, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on the Solar System and on space exploration.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Most known asteroids orbit in the main belt between which two planets?
Mars and Jupiter
Mars and Jupiter bracket the belt, where Jupiter's gravity stopped the rubble from building into a planet and set it colliding into fragments.
Q 02Which astronomer proposed the word asteroid, from Greek for 'star-like'?
William Herschel
William Herschel chose it because, through the telescopes of the day, the new bodies showed no planetary disc, only star-like points that moved.
Q 03Which storybook hero lives on asteroid B-612?
The Little Prince
The Little Prince's home got a real namesake: asteroid 46610 was named Bésixdouze because 46610 written in hexadecimal is B612.
Q 04Giuseppe Piazzi, who found the first asteroid, was an astronomer and also what?
A Catholic priest
A Catholic priest of the Theatine order, Piazzi first announced his discovery as a comet before its slow, even motion hinted at something more.
Q 05Piazzi's original two-part name for his discovery honoured a goddess and whom?
King Ferdinand III of Sicily
King Ferdinand III of Sicily was Piazzi's patron, and the goddess half of the name was Sicily's patron deity, so both parts honoured the island where he worked.
Q 06Meteor Crater, dug by an iron asteroid only about 50 metres wide some 50,000 years ago, is in which US state?
Arizona
Arizona's Meteor Crater holds surprisingly little melted rock because the iron asteroid hit at only about 12 km per second, far slower than once assumed.
Q 07The asteroid belt's combined mass is roughly how much of the Moon's mass?
About 3%
About 3%: astronomers weighed the whole belt by measuring how its gravity subtly tugs on the motions of Mars and the other planets.
Q 08Asteroids are broadly classified as C (carbonaceous), S (silicaceous) and which other class?
M (metallic)
M (metallic) asteroids are nickel-iron, thought to be remnant cores of early bodies that partly melted and let their iron sink to the centre.
Q 09What makes an object a comet rather than an asteroid?
It shows a coma or tail when warmed
It shows a coma or tail when warmed because sunlight turns its ices to gas; comets that use up their ice go dormant and can look just like asteroids.
Q 10What is a small rock drifting in space, too small to count as an asteroid, called?
A meteoroid
A meteoroid can be a chip of Mars knocked loose by an impact, which is how rocks from Mars have reached scientists here on Earth.
Q 11By 2026, astronomers had catalogued roughly how many asteroids?
About 1.5 million
About 1.5 million, a haul driven by automated sky surveys that can log thousands of new asteroids a month.
Q 12Which spacecraft was the first to fly through the asteroid belt, on its way to Jupiter?
Pioneer 10
Pioneer 10 crossed in 1972–73 and took fewer dust hits than feared, because the belt's asteroids are so spread out that craft pass through without incident.
Q 13Which asteroid is the brightest seen from Earth, at times faintly visible to the naked eye?
Vesta
Vesta outshines larger asteroids because its light-coloured surface reflects unusually much sunlight, and it usually orbits closer to the Sun.
Q 21Which asteroid did Japan's Hayabusa probe sample on the first mission to bring asteroid material back to Earth?
Itokawa
Itokawa's dust reached Earth in 2010 after Hayabusa limped home on its ion engines, battling a fuel leak and failed reaction wheels.
Q 22Hayabusa2 returned samples of which asteroid to Earth in December 2020?
Ryugu
Ryugu's grains contained uracil, one of RNA's four bases, suggesting such building blocks formed in asteroids and reached the early Earth.
Q 23NASA's OSIRIS-REx collected a sample from which asteroid in October 2020?
Bennu
Bennu's surface turned out so loosely packed that the spacecraft would have sunk into it had it not fired its thrusters right after grabbing its sample.
Q 14Which German astronomer, known for a paradox about why the night sky is dark, found the second and fourth asteroids?
Heinrich Olbers
Heinrich Olbers argued the first asteroids were shards of a destroyed planet, an idea later abandoned, and found the fourth while hunting for more pieces.
Q 15Which asteroid is the third-largest object in the asteroid belt by volume and mass?
Pallas
Pallas lent its name to the metal palladium, which chemist William Hyde Wollaston isolated from platinum ore soon after the asteroid was found.
Q 16Which spacecraft, launched in 2007, orbited two different protoplanets of the asteroid belt in turn?
Dawn
Dawn could orbit two different worlds because its hyper-efficient ion engines let it enter and leave orbit, which earlier chemical-rocket missions could not.
Q 17What did the famous bright spots in Ceres's Occator crater turn out to be?
Salt deposits
Salt deposits: salty water from a deep reservoir below the crater percolated up and evaporated, leaving a highly reflective crust of mostly sodium carbonate.
Q 18Which spacecraft took the first close-up image of an asteroid, 951 Gaspra, in 1991?
Galileo
Galileo's big dish antenna failed to open fully in 1991, so its later pictures, asteroids included, trickled home through far slower low-gain antennas.
Q 19Tracking the orbit of the tiny moon circling asteroid 243 Ida let scientists work out what about Ida?
How dense it is
How dense it is: the moon's orbit revealed Ida's mass, and the low density that followed all but ruled out Ida being made of iron-rich rock.
Q 20Which spacecraft made the first landing on an asteroid, touching down on Eros in 2001?
NEAR Shoemaker
NEAR Shoemaker was never designed to land, yet it survived touching down on Eros in 2001 and kept sending data for about two weeks.
Q 24In which US state did the OSIRIS-REx sample capsule land in September 2023?
Utah
Utah's desert test range caught the capsule, but two stuck fasteners then kept NASA from fully opening the sample container for about three months.
Q 25NASA's DART spacecraft deliberately crashed into which asteroid moonlet in September 2022?
Dimorphos
Dimorphos posed no threat; it was picked because it passes in front of its larger partner as seen from Earth, so telescopes could time any change in its orbit.
Q 26What gave NASA's DART crash far more push on its target than the spacecraft's own impact?
Debris blasted off the moonlet
Debris blasted off the moonlet recoiled like rocket exhaust, which is why the moonlet's orbit around its partner shortened by more than half an hour.
Q 27What job did LICIACube, the small Italian spacecraft that rode along with DART, carry out?
Photographed the impact
Photographed the impact, a job DART could not do for itself, because the crash destroyed the spacecraft along with its own camera.
Q 28Which asteroid briefly had a 2.7% chance of hitting Earth on Friday 13 April 2029, per late 2004 estimates?
Apophis
Apophis will instead pass about 32,000 km above Earth in 2029, closer than many satellites, and NASA redirected a spacecraft to study how the close pass changes it.
Q 29The name of the asteroid feared in 2004 is the Greek form of which Egyptian deity?
Apep, enemy of the sun-god Ra
Apep, enemy of the sun-god Ra, suited a rock once feared as a doomsday threat, until radar tracking convinced NASA it poses no impact risk for at least a century.
Q 30As of 2025, the highest Torino impact rating ever given, a 4, falls in which colour zone?
Yellow
Yellow, the zone 'meriting attention by astronomers': that 2004 rating lasted only four days before new observations ruled out an impact.