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
I was just watching something the other day that said you could travel over 100,000 light years before the odds would indicate you would hit something.
Space is like. REALLLY big. It’s the biggest. There isn’t anything to hit where they send the probe, and the pull of gravity is accounted for.
They aimed it specifically at a tiny spot near a planet to fling it way out though. Using a LOT of math somebody did probably by hand.
Imagine you’re bowling, and the land has 12 pins.
and is the size of the continent of Africa. And the pins are spread out randomly.
You are the bowling ball, and stuff to collide into is spread out so scarcely that it’s unlikely you’ll hit something withing your lifetime.
Load up Kerbal, open the cheat window to put any ship into orbit of the sun, turn on infinite fuel/ power.
Now try to crash into anything without opening the map screen.
Bet all you can manage is crashing into the only thing you can see, the sun. Even that’s a whole other problem that takes way too much fuel
The sun is 99.86% of the solar system by mass. Jupiter is around 0.095% and Saturn is 0.0285%
So if you can avoid those three youve avoided 99.99% of everything in the solar system.
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