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

Sometimes things do collide. We track the orbits of much of the debris satellites that are up there and manage the orbits of new items so as not to collide. This has to be done very carefully as there are many items something could collide with. Last I saw there was around 10,000 debris satellites so it is a lot of work. As I recall the sbirs system was supposed to track all the items in orbit.