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 big. Really big. Much bigger than a ship on the ocean.
If you are on a random spot on the ocean, the chance of crashing into something is next to nil, especially if (for all intents and purposes) it’s infinite. There almost no islands in the middle of the pacific. As there are almost no planets/asteroids in space.
They look in the mirrors a lot?
It’s like driving through the desert and accidentally hitting a tree. The odds are extremely small.
It’s like if you and a friend threw a tiny pebble at a random direction and you both are 50 yards apart what are the odds of them hitting each other. Space is like that be they are more like 200 miles apart.
Crash into what bro? Space is unimaginably vast. Not like the movies at all. Asteroid fields in real life are so spread apart that there’s no real way you’d actually run much of a risk of hitting one, there’s nothing out there, man.
Space is generally very empty. Technically yes it is possible that a probe may hit a random object, anything from the size of a grain of sand to the size of a car is small and hard to track, so it’s unpredictable. For larger objects we can generally track them, within the solar system and in the off chance they’re a problem there will be an ever so slight course correction to avoid it. If two orbiting bodies are on a path to intersect, just a tiny change in velocity will ultimately result in them being miles apart by the time they get close to each other.
The Voyager probes were also not really meant to survive this long and go this far. Their current status is pretty much a bonus on top of their completed mission. Space outside the solar system is even emptier than space within the solar system. The chances that the probes hit something is next to none. Eventually they’ll go silent and we don’t really care what happens to them after that, but chances are they will be drifting in space for a long time.
Space is so mind-bogglingly empty, you can look at a star 5 BILLION light years away, and the only reason that you can even see that star is that there is NOTHING between that star and your eyeball.
Look into the night sky and realize that the things you are seeing are thousands of light years away. Space is empty.
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”.
Imagine that you are strong enough to throw a baseball across the entire US. You stand in New York, and your equally strong friend stands in Los Angeles. Now on the count of three you each throw a baseball at each other.
The odds of those two baseballs hitting each other in mid flight is about the same as two objects colliding in space.
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