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60 free Asteroids trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 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.
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Q 01Most known asteroids orbit in the main belt between which two planets?
Mars and Jupiter
The belt lies roughly 2 to 4 astronomical units from the Sun.
Q 02Which astronomer coined the word asteroid, from Greek for 'star-like'?
William Herschel
Early asteroids showed no disc in telescopes, so they looked like stars that moved.
Q 03What was the first asteroid to be discovered, on 1 January 1801?
Ceres
It was announced as a new planet and is now classed as the belt's only dwarf planet.
Q 04Giuseppe Piazzi, who found the first asteroid, was a priest of which religious order?
Theatine
He was also a mathematician and ran the observatory at Palermo.
Q 05Piazzi's original two-part name for his discovery honoured the goddess of agriculture and whom?
King Ferdinand III of Sicily
The goddess's oldest temple stood in Sicily, which made her a doubly local choice.
Q 06Roughly how large is the largest object in the belt?
About 940 km across
That is about a quarter of the Moon's diameter.
Q 07The combined mass of all asteroids is only about what fraction of the Moon's mass?
3%
About 60 per cent of that sits in just four bodies.
Q 08Asteroids are broadly classified as C (carbonaceous), S (silicaceous) and which other class?
M (metallic)
C stands for carbonaceous and S for silicaceous.
Q 09What is the key feature that makes an object a comet rather than an asteroid?
It shows a coma or tail when warmed
Some objects sit on a continuum, and dormant comets can end up looking just like asteroids.
Q 10Any object smaller than what size is traditionally called a meteoroid rather than an asteroid?
One metre
Above that, a rocky body that is not a planet or comet counts as an asteroid.
Q 11Approximately how many asteroids are known?
1,000,000
On average they are about a million kilometres apart, so the belt is mostly empty space.
Q 12How far apart, on average, are the objects in the asteroid belt?
About one million km
Spacecraft cross the belt routinely without any risk of collision.
Q 13Which asteroid is the brightest visible from Earth, sometimes faintly visible to the naked eye?
Vesta
It reaches magnitude 5.1 and is thought to be the second most massive asteroid.
Q 14Which German astronomer discovered the second asteroid in 1802 and the fourth in 1807?
Q 21Which asteroid was the target of the first sample-return mission, Japan's Hayabusa?
Itokawa
Its low density suggests it is a rubble pile of boulders rather than a solid body.
Q 22Hayabusa2 returned samples of which asteroid to Earth on 5 December 2020?
Ryugu
The samples contained uracil, one of the four components of RNA, and vitamin B3.
Q 23NASA's OSIRIS-REx collected a sample from which asteroid in October 2020?
Bennu
The capsule parachuted back to Earth on 24 September 2023.
Q 24In which US state did the OSIRIS-REx sample capsule land in September 2023?
Heinrich Olbers
Like the first, his 1802 find was at first considered a planet.
Q 15Which asteroid is the third largest in the Solar System by volume and mass?
Pallas
It gives its name to the Pallas family of asteroids.
Q 16Which spacecraft, launched in 2007, orbited two different protoplanets of the asteroid belt in turn?
Dawn
It entered orbit around the first in July 2011 and left for the second in late 2012.
Q 17The brightest of the dwarf planet's mysterious bright spots lies in the middle of which crater?
Occator
The central spot is named Cerealia Facula, and the group to its east Vinalia Faculae.
Q 18Which spacecraft took the first close-up image of an asteroid, 951 Gaspra, in 1991?
Galileo
Two years later, en route to Jupiter, it also imaged 243 Ida and its moon.
Q 19What is the name of the small moon of asteroid 243 Ida, discovered in probe images from 1993?
Dactyl
Mission member Ann Harch spotted it in the returned pictures.
Q 20Which spacecraft made the first landing on an asteroid, touching down on Eros in 2001?
NEAR Shoemaker
It was renamed after planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker following its 1996 launch.
Utah
Distribution and analysis of the material to laboratories worldwide followed.
Q 25NASA's DART spacecraft deliberately crashed into which asteroid moonlet in September 2022?
Dimorphos
Neither it nor its parent body posed any threat; the pair simply made an ideal test target.
Q 26By how much did the DART impact shorten the moonlet's orbit around its parent asteroid?
32 minutes
The result vastly exceeded the pre-defined success threshold of 73 seconds.
Q 27Which Italian CubeSat photographed the DART impact?
LICIACube
ESA's Hera mission, launched in 2024, will survey the aftermath in detail.
Q 28Which asteroid briefly had a 2.7% chance of hitting Earth on Friday 13 April 2029, per early 2004 estimates?
Apophis
It will instead pass about 31,600 km above the surface, closer than geostationary satellites.
Q 29The name of the asteroid feared in 2004 is the Greek form of which Egyptian deity?
Apep, enemy of the sun-god Ra
A serpent of chaos was a fitting namesake for a supposed doomsday rock.
Q 30What is the highest rating any asteroid has ever received on the Torino impact hazard scale?
4
The 2029 near-miss asteroid held it for four days in late 2004; 2024 YR4 reached 3 in early 2025.