How is it when we launch spacecraft out to orbit other planets or eventually to go to the moon, the craft don’t collide with all the space junk up there?

Question

The ISS is under constant threat of being destroyed by debris, so when we (eventually) launch astronauts to go to the moon or when we launched like Juno or New Horizons, how did they not get destroyed by the space junk?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

As others have stated, we do track everything that we can that is orbiting the Earth, but another thing to remember is that the Earth simply is huge compared to what’s orbiting it. You could easily put 20,000 pennies evenly spaced in a large parking lot and most of them wouldn’t even be close to each other. It’s a bit like that, but imagine that the parking lot is much much bigger, and the pennies are much much smaller.