Masses of asteroids and total mass of the main asteroid belt

Abstract

An estimation of the mass of the main asteroid belt was made on the basis of the new version of EPM2014 ephemerides of the Institute of Applied Astronomy of Russian Academy of Sciences using about 800000 positional observations of planets and spacecraft. We obtained the individual estimations of masses of large asteroids from radar data, as well as estimates of the masses of asteroids by using known diameters and estimated average densities for the three taxonomic types (C, S, M), and used the known mass values of binary asteroids and asteroids to which spacecraft approached. A two-dimensional homogeneous annulus with dimensions corresponding observed width of the main asteroid belt (2.06 au and 3.27 au) was used instead of a previous massive one-dimensional ring for modeling total perturbations from small asteroids. The obtained value of the total mass of the main asteroid belt is (12.25 ± 0.19)10-10 M.