Flying through the Asteriod belt?

Question

How do robotic space craft (Voyager, Cassini etc) get through the Asteroid belt without getting smashed by a lump of rock?

Answer 1

Paul is absolutely correct.

If you stand on one of the asteroid belt asteroids, it's generally millions of miles to the next nearest asteroid.  Plenty of space to navigate a tiny probe through.

The Cassini spacecraft managed to make it through the rings of Saturn.  That was actually risky.

Answer 2

Don't be misled by the sequence of the Millennium Falcon dodging asteroids.  The real Universe isn't like that at all.

Answer 3

my guess is that they have senors that make it avoid rocks, or they haven't passes through it, not sure but i really do think that monkeys are steering the ships.

Answer 4

I got one chance in three million for an asteroid hit on a straight radial pass, if the average asteroid radius is 10 meters. The odds against are proportional to that average radius. If the average asteroid is only 1 meter in radius, the odds for a collision are one in 300,000. And, of course, the usual pass through the asteroid belt is longer than a straight radial pass. So the odds might be more like 1 in 100,000.

Answer 5

Hi there,

The answer is that the asteroid belt, like the rest of space, is mostly empty.  The probability of hitting anything in space, whether you're flying through the asteroid belt or not, is incredibly small.  Believe it!

I checked some quick numbers, and the entire mass of the asteroid belt is less than 4% of our moon!  So think about taking 4% of the moon, break it up into chunks, and scatter those chunks over an ENORMOUS distance, and you'll realize why an encounter with an asteroid in the asteroid belt is not likely at all- in fact, it's estimated at about 1 in a BILLION.

The other thing is that not all asteroids are big.  The very biggest object in the asteroid belt is Ceres, about 600 miles in diameter, but most of the other stuff is a whole lot smaller, even ranging to the size of small pebbles or even dust particles.

So they just send those probes through, without detectors or anything to move them out of the way of asteroids, and nothing has hit them yet.  This article verifies what I've told you and has some additional stuff too if you're interested.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_be...

Hope this helps.