With all of these debris like dust loating around in space, how do satellites remain clean? How are they able to capture clear photos despite no means to clean the lens?

Question

With all of these debris like dust loating around in space, how do satellites remain clean? How are they able to capture clear photos despite no means to clean the lens?

In: Planetary Science

Answer 1

There’s actually not that much dust in space. Space dust is a real thing, but we are talking about a couple tiny particles in such a massive area, that the chance of it hitting a satellite is negligible to non-existant.

The density of the dust cloud through which the Earth is traveling is approximately 0.000006 dust grains/m3

Essentially a one in a million chance of it hitting a satellite, and even then the dust grain is so tiny that it’s more like a particle of smoke than what we think of as dust.