List of minor planets
The following is a list of numbered minor planets (essentially the same as asteroids) in ascending numerical order.
There are also 25,074 named minor planets mostly after people, places and figures from mythology and fiction,[4] which account for only 3.2% of all numbered catalog entries.
(4596) 1981 QB and 734551 Monin are currently the lowest-numbered unnamed and highest-numbered named minor planets, respectively.
[1][4] It is expected that the upcoming survey by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will discover another 5 million minor planets during the next ten years—almost a tenfold increase from current numbers.
The information given for a minor planet includes a permanent and provisional designation (§ Designation), a citation that links to the meanings of minor planet names (only if named), the discovery date, location, and credited discoverers (§ Discovery and § Discoverers), a category with a more refined classification than the principal grouping represented by the background color (§ Category), a mean-diameter, sourced from JPL's SBDB or otherwise calculated estimates in italics (§ Diameter), and a reference (Ref) to the corresponding pages at MPC and JPL SBDB.
The MPC may credit one or several astronomers, a survey or similar program, or even the observatory site with the discovery.
This rule was not necessarily followed in earlier times, and some bodies received a number but subsequently became lost minor planets.
As the total of numbered minor planets is growing by the tens of thousands every year, all statistical figures are constantly changing.
Observatories, telescopes and surveys that report astrometric observations of small Solar System bodies to the Minor Planet Center receive a numeric or alphanumeric MPC code such as 675 for the Palomar Observatory, or G96 for the Mount Lemmon Survey.
In this catalog, minor planets are classified into one of 8 principal orbital groups and highlighted with a distinct color.
These are: The vast majority of minor planets are evenly distributed between the inner-, central and outer parts of the asteroid belt, which are separated by the two Kirkwood gaps at 2.5 and 2.82 AU.
If available, a minor planet's mean diameter in meters (m) or kilometers (km) is taken from the NEOWISE mission of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which the Small-Body Database has also adopted.
Each table stands for 100,000 minor planets, each cell for a specific partial list of 1,000 sequentially numbered bodies.
