Any of numerous small celestial bodies composed of rock and metal that move around the sun (mainly between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter)

Usage examples of planetoid.

Soon there was a terrific explosion as the pent-up air of the planetoid broke through its weakening container, and the sluggish river of allotropic ion flowed in an ever larger stream, ever faster.

Stages The Extractor, in position at destination, analyzes, selects and draws substance from proximate asteroids, comets, satellites, planetoids, swarms, star surface and other accessible bodies and strata, reduces the substance to spunnel-teleportable constituents, loads the mass into the spunnel facility and dispatches the product.

If an alien probe is there, could we spot it among the countless dots and specks that will represent stars, micrometeorites, planetoids, photographic plate flaws, and dust?

Within the hour, this planetoid and all the scientific mechanisms it contains will be possessions of the Saturnian Interplanetary Empire.

And Ulice Ston resigned as the head of the Department of Alien Affairs, married a man who had never set foot on any world or planetoid within the Deluros system, and had eight children in the next eleven years.

To them life on a planet like Earth was as life to a terrestrian on a planetoid such as Ceres, Juno or Eros would have seemed.

Vorian Atreides had returned home to brief the Jihad Council on his efforts to strengthen the Unallied Planets, and brought with him devastating news of yet another randomly destroyed human colony--this time the mining planetoid Rhisso.

Four Twenty-five was fairly near though in a different system from Shubra, on a planetoid that had remained otherwise uncolonized, and had no commonly used name of its own apart from the base.

She knew the whole astrobiology team was in a race to study every facet of the colliding worlds before the collision destroyed the planetoid and utterly transformed Martin as well.

Vaguely, Julius had been picturing a thousand, or at least several hundred, berserker battlecraft swarming around the planetoid.

Consolidated Systems, operating from the manmade planetoid called the Ricot Habitat, a Coherent Light project that had survived its builder, and Brighter Suns, headquartered on Vesta.

Eighty years ago, an experiment in accelerated evolution of chemoautotrophic vacuum organisms had been set up on a planetoid in the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt.

But when gravity is extremely weak, as on that planetoid, the inner ear reacts erratically, if not irrationally.

Hidalgo was a planetoid no bigger than the moon Amalthea, in a stretched-out orbit between Mars and Saturn.

By this time, too, astrophysics had moved on so much that few astronomers wanted to devote their lives to anything as mundane as rocky planetoids.