Comparison of masses of asteroids derived by dynamical methods (mainly from mutual perturbations of asteroids with close encounters) with ones obtained by astrophysical methods is carried out. It is shown that the asteroids with masses >10
-12·M

markedly affect the orbit of Mars on the level of accuracy of ranging measurements to the martian landers Viking-1,2 and Pathfinder. The dynamical and astrophysical methods seem to be complimentary. An attempt is undertaken to extent the list of 300 perturbing asteroids accounted in the DE405 ephemerides. Several tests were tried in which the different sets of perturbing asteroids and their masses (up to 351 simultaneously integrating asteroids) varied when processing the observations of the landers.
Overall perturbing effect of remaining asteroids (the 300 biggest ones are excluded) has been modeled as being caused by a ring in the ecliptic plane. Mass
M and radius
R of the ring are estimated as
M
518*10
-12 ·M
 are estimated by fitting to the derived set of masses of the biggest 300 asteroids. The obtained distribution is extrapolated to small masses and the value M<sub>belt</sub><img src="cong.png">1700*10<sup>-12</sup>·M<img src="sun.png"> is obtained in a good accordance with our dynamical finding given above.
An expression for estimating the total number of minor planets in any unit interval of absolute magnitude H has been derived. The comparison with the observed distribution shows that at present about 10% of the asteroids with the absolute magnitudes H<14 are discovered (according to the derived distribution about 130000 of such asteroids are expected to exist).
In Appendix a list of the derived masses of 357 asteroids tested by the analysis of the lander ranging data is given.
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<span style="margin-left:25pt; font-weight:bolder; font-size:12px;">Ключевые слова:</span>
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Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), masses of asteroids, perturbing asteroids, perturbations with close encounters, martian landers, perturbing effect, total mass of the main asteroid belt, theoretical distribution of asteroids with given masses, fragmentation theory, minor planets, absolute magnitudes.
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