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
Crash into what, exactly? Don’t be misled by the incredibly inaccurate representations you may have seen in movies and on TV – space is basically a HUGE volume of NOTHING, with the occasional TINY, TINY patches of stuff. And even if you actually come close to one of those patches, all it’s likely to do is change your direction a little.
Example 1: You could (just about fit) *every other planet in the solar system* into the space between the Earth and the Moon.
Example 2: The asteroid belt, packed with all those rocks you’ve seen fictional spaceships dodging so precariously. On average the bodies we’ve identified in the Asteroid belt are about *600,000 miles* apart (that’s about 25 times the distance around the equator). If you went straight through the middle of the belt twice a day for the rest of your life, the likelihood you’d ever even get close enough to see one of them (let alone hit it) is vanishingly small.
On all scales, basically (intergalactic and bigger down to subatomic), the answer, just about everywhere in the universe, to the question “What’s here?” is “Almost nothing”.
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