Concentrated between Mars and Jupiter float thousands of what scientists call Minor Planets, or Asteroids, which are chunks of rocks of size ranging from a few metres to a thousand kilometres. Asteroids are believed to be leftover from the time planets began to form in our Solar System, and have failed to coalesce into another planet.

The first minor planet, Ceres, was found less than two hundred years ago, by the Italian monk and astronomer, Giuseppe Piazzi. His discovery ended the conundrum which had puzzled astronomers for decades. In 1766, Titius von Wittenburg developed an empirical formula for planetary distances. Curiously, this formula not only fitted quite well with the known distances of the six planets from the Sun, it also made room for a planet located between Mars and Jupiter. The notion of this unknown planet was further popularized by Johann Bode, then Director of Berlin Observatory. So much so, the relation became known as Bode's Law, and was given much credence when astronomers noticed that the distance of the newly-discovered Uranus from the Sun also conformed to this rule. The systematic hunt of the unknown planet began in 1800, and culminated in Piazzi'feat on 1 January 1801.

It soon turned out that Ceres was just one of the members of a huge assemblage of space debris orbiting around the Sun. To date, with the aid of powerful telescopes, more than 8,000 minor planets have been catalogued, with perhaps 50,000 await future sightings.

Minuscule though they are in the planetary scale, asteroids constitute a unique family in our Solar System that furnishes far more surprises than we could have anticipated. Some asteroids, despite their small size, possess satellites of their own. A handful of others suffer serious perturbations by major planets and travel in highly eccentric orbits, which can send them well beyond the orbit of Jupiter. The so-called Near-Earth Asteroids cross the Earth's orbit and make occasional close calls to our home planet. Should any one of these rocky hunks crash into the Earth, the consequences would be catastrophic. Today many scientists attribute the extinction of dinosaurs to a cataclysmic impact of an asteroid with our planet about 65 million years ago.

The Astronomy Show Hunting Asteroids will lead you to the world of these tiny members of our Solar System. The programme will focus on their interesting physical and orbital characteristics, as well as groundbreaking amazing discoveries that are being made in recent decades.