The Dynamical Evolution of the Asteroid Belt

The asteroid belt helps us in reconstructing the origin and the evolution of the solar system, probably better than the planets themselves. This is because the asteroid belt provides several key constraints that can be used to effectively guide the development, calibration, and validation of evolutionary models. Compared to other small-body populations, such as the Kuiper belt or Oort cloud, the constraints provided by the asteroid belt are probably more stringent, due to the fact that the number and the properties of the asteroids are better known, thanks to groundbased observations, space missions, and meteorite analysis. The structure of this review chapter is therefore as follows. We start by reviewing in section 2 what the most important observational constraints on the asteroid belt are and what they suggest. Then, in section 3, we will review the main models proposed, from the oldest to the most recent, and from the earliest to the latest evolutionary phases they address. In section 4, we will discuss several implications for asteroid science from our current preferred view of the dynamical evolution of the asteroid belt. The dynamical evolution of the asteroid belt has already been the object of a review chapter by Petit et al. (2002) in the Asteroids III book. This review therefore has an important overlap with that chapter. Nevertheless, both our