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
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.
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