How come solar system probes never collide with asteroids?

2.68K views

Is it just dumb luck that our probes (e.g. Juno, Voyager I, Voyager 2) never collide with even the smallest rocks in space? Is space in our solar system so void that the odds of a collision are so low? Does NASA (and other global space programs) have details about natural debris throughout our solar system that they can avoid collisions through navigation?

In: Physics

10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Its hard to appreciate just how much space there is in Space.

The odds of hitting anything while passing through the asteroid belt are so small that NASA doesn’t bother to calculate them for missions crossing through that region. Every asteroid is at least tens of millions of miles away from its nearest neighbor. That’s dozens of times the distance to the moon. If you were standing on one asteroid, you wouldn’t be able to see any others.

Space is empty.

You are viewing 1 out of 10 answers, click here to view all answers.