How do long range space probes like Voyager 1 anticipate traveling through space for hundreds or thousands of years without hitting something, getting pulled into something’s gravity and crashing, etc?
In: Planetary Science
Space is very empty. It’s not like the movies where the asteroid fields look like a cave system.
The chances of you actually hitting something, especially in interstellar space, is incredibly tiny.
there is nothing there to crash into.
space is basically empty. just think about how big stars look in comparison to the blackness that surounds them. and each of them is HUGE, as big as our star.
As for gravity, gravity decreases wwith diatance squared. even at earths orbit, the suns gravity hardly affects us. it takes a full year to pull earth around once, and voiager is moving fast enough to escape it entirly.
you have to be a really good shot to hit anything in space at all.
You know those dramatic scenes in sci fi movies where the heroes have to fly through an asteroid field without hitting anything?
In reality, in an asteroid field each rock is 500,000 miles away from the next one. And that counts as “close together”.
Space is really, really, really big. And almost completely empty.
There’s nothing out there to crash into. There may be very tiny, very fast particles that pass through them and could affect instruments, so there’s redundancy in most of it. As for gravitational pull, they calculate the position of the nearest objects (planets and the sun) in order to ensure that the object doesn’t get affected by it; or, in the case of craft like V2, intentionally calculate trajectories that pull it into the gravity of planets in such a way that it helps to accelerate the craft through something called slingshotting.
Space has so much of its namesake that it can be hard to even imagine. There’s just too much room out there.
* It’s not all empty, but we don’t have to worry about some lonely hydrogen atom blowing us up when we ram it.
So while you have to be careful not to smash any planes or satellites on the way out… once you’re gone there’s so much space in space that hitting something becomes the real challenge!
If you want to get smash *(or land on)* something really easy and close *(in space terms)* like Mars, then you’re trying to hit something a bit over 4200 miles across that’s never been closer than 34.8 MILLION miles away from us since we started measuring stuff, so you’re aiming for where it’ll be six months after you launched.
It’s a bit uneven in the belt, but an average distance estimate between those asteroids is over 2 million miles, and most of them are pretty small.
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
There’s nothing to crash into.
The asteroid belt? Yeah, million+ miles between asteroids. After that? Nothin.
Because space is mind boggling massive and empty. Voyager left Earth going 38k mph in 1977, it took until 2012 to get out of our solar system. It’s going to be another 77,000 years before it gets to the closest star.
Space is so big and so empty that the smallest distances between two objects are measured in the hundreds of thousands of miles.
That’s the distance for asteroids in an asteroid belt.
The distance between planets is millions and millions of miles and the space between solar systems is hell I’m not even sure how many zeros that would be because we made a whole new unit just to express that distance.
The next closest solar system is approximately 25 trillion miles away.
25,000,000,000,000.
Think about that. It takes 1000 millions to make 1 billion and it takes 1,000 billion to make 1 trillion so 25 trillion would be 2,500 billion to put it in a different way.
Fun fact, the Milky Way Galaxy (our home galaxy) is on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy. Expected collision is said to happen in about 4.5 Billion years. Billion with a B. Even though stars are concentrated in the center in both galaxies, the chances of actual collision are incredibly small.
If the collision, or merging of the galaxies, should happen, the Earth would have already been gone for 3 Billion years due to the sun becoming hotter.
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