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 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.
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