How come solar system probes never collide with asteroids?

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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

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Anonymous 0 Comments

We do have a lot of information about where most of the major asteroids are in the solar system (although at the time a lot of these deep space probes were launched, we knew significantly less). However, we also knew at the time that planets and other massive celestial bodies (like moons) tend to clear their orbits of debris (either by slinging it away or absorbing it). This means that, aside from the astroid belts and the legrange points (which are spots on/around an objects orbit around a larger object that smaller objects can also orbit safely), most of the solar system has been emptied of space debris.

Outside of that, the only major concern is debris in the Kuiper belt (like a second astroid belt out past neptune) and dust from the Oort cloud (a sphere of dust on the edge of the solar winds, the theoretical limit of our solar system’s influence). But the Kuiper belt is flat (so you could jut go over/under it and the Oort cloud is super far away.

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