I’ve seen a handful of SciFi movies, and people flying TOWARD an asteroid barely dodging it just seems weird. They make it look like asteroids are slow moving.
What would it really be like?
/sorry if this has been covered.
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In reality, most asteroids are thousands of miles apart, and detectable from a long range. So it would be very boring. The only time you would see a densely packed field like in the movies is a debris field, which is also detectable from a long range.
I’ll put it this way.
NASA launched the New Horizons probe to investigate Pluto.
Its course took it through the asteroid belt.
NASA was very excited that by sheer chance it managed to get close enough to an asteroid for it take [this photo](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Asteroid_2002_JF56.jpg)
Closest approach was 101,867 km.
Consider floating slowly through an empty abyss as far as the eye can see
It’d be a lot like that
SciFi asteroid fields are wayyyyyy denser than real asteroid fields are. The average distance between rocks in our asteroid belt is about a million kilometers. There are billions of rocks but they’re spread out over such a huge volume that there’s still a lot of space between them
NASA doesn’t particularly worry about the asteroid belt when launching probes. The 12 largest asteroids in the belt contain over two thirds of the mass. If your probe isn’t on a direct collision course for one of the 20 largest ones we can easily track then its odds of hitting anything are basically zero
In other words, C-3PO had it backwards. The odds of *unsuccessfully* navigating an asteroid field are lower than 3,720 to 1
The same as traveling through any other part of space. Forget what you see in sci-fi. Space is really really empty, In real life, asteroids are so far apart that you would never ever see two at the same time. The average distance between asteroids is estimated to be something close to 1 million km. You’d have to be intentionally heading directly towards one to even see it with your naked eye let alone be in danger of crashing into it. When space agencies send probes through the asteroid belt to the outer planets, they don’t even bother planning avoidance maneuvers because the chance of the probe coming anywhere close to an asteroid is that low.
The closest thing you could get to flying through what science fiction represents as an “asteroid field” would probably be flying through a dense planetary ring system and even then, the individual rocks are going to be barely moving relative to one another.
The problem with, say, the asteroid field scene in The Empire Strikes Back is that if the asteroids are really that tightly packed together but flying around every which way, they would either disperse into a much less dense cloud or demolish each other into much smaller rocks very quickly (at least on astronomical timescales, probably less than decades). The only thing that could explain such a field in real life is a moon or planet crossing the Roche limit in the recent past, creating an unstable debris cloud that will eventually form into a ring system.
You know the dense rings of debris around Jupiter, Uranus and Saturn? The ones that looks so solid that it seems like you could just run along them?
If you aimed your spaceship right at that ring and closed your eyes, you’d likely just fly right through without ever getting near an asteroid.
Space is so unimaginably big with such incredibly big objects that even the ones that look close together have an amazing amount of empty space in between.
As for moving slowly… slow is relative. The international space station is moving at 17,500 miles an hour. It orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes. But when a shuttle docks with the station, the shuttle matches its velocity to that of the station, so from their perspective, the station is almost sitting still.
So an asteroid seeming to move fast or slow is mostly relative to the speed of the craft moving past them. It’s still an important quality though. Force is mass multiplied with acceleration. Even the tiniest object can hit like a bomb if it’s going fast enough.
The international space station is constantly on the lookout for objects on a collision course. At 17,500 miles an hour, even a old screw from an old satellite can do major damage. And just like that even tiny rocks or grains of dust can damage a space ship if that ship is getting hit fast enough.
The common image of a dense asteroid field is all Hollywood.
In even the densest part of the actual Asteroid Belt, from standing on one asteroid you wouldn’t be able to even SEE the NEAREST asteroid without a telescope. They’re hundreds of thousands of km apart.
“Astronomical” means “big” for a reason lol
I have to weigh in here. what everyone is saying about huge spaces between bodies is true. Lets say it wasn’t, just for fun. It is absolutely possible. The problem is spaceships don’t maneuver like planes on earth, like you see in movies. In the atmosphere you can use the control surfaces of wings, ailerons, elevators, and whatever to make the aircraft change its orientation very fast. Not true in space. The ISS, capsules, satellites, all use thrusters to move and change orientation. Bad part is, a tiny push could get you way off track if there is no counter push to even you out. So lets take the falcon in the asteroid field. Every roll, climb, and decent (only for example cuz no relative orentation in space, but for examples sake) would have to be accomplished by thrust and counter thrust in each move. This would mean the ship would have to carry a huge amount of propellant. This is not reasonable, given our current tech, but neither is light speed, or to the best of our knowledge, tight asteroid belts. But, hey its fun to imagine!
The big ones are easy to dodge. It’s the tiny ones you need to watch out for. micrometeors can do a lot of damage.
It would be like flying through space, except every once in a while your navigation tells you about any big asteroids a thousand miles ahead so you change course slightly. If we were were a regularly space-faring society that navigated the asteroid fields a lot, we’d probably have them all mapped out and stored in your navigational computer anyway, so your course would already be charted through them to minimize course corrections, and thus fuel.
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