neufer wrote: ↑Thu Oct 21, 2021 1:12 am
Fred the Cat wrote: ↑Wed Oct 20, 2021 11:02 pm
Trying to
search for info on how many or how concentrated the asteroids are in the two areas Lucy will explore seems to indicate “we’ll find out”. Navigating through them could be akin to early ships sailing coasts of unknown waters. Kind of like throwing
darts in the dark then
checking how you did.
If collisions (i.e., ~10 km approaches) between dense main asteroid belt bodies are expected to occur
only once every 10 million years... and considering that
no spacecraft has ever had a problem traversing the main asteroid belt... I wouldn't worry about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt#Collisions wrote:
The main asteroid belt (the white donut-shaped cloud), the
Hildas (the orange "triangle" just inside the orbit of Jupiter), the Jupiter trojans (green), and the near-Earth asteroids/
<<
The high population of the asteroid belt makes for a very active environment, where collisions between asteroids occur frequently (on astronomical time scales). Collisions between main-belt bodies with a mean radius of 10 km are expected to occur about once every 10 million years.>>.
From the first link I had read
"By 1961, more than half a century after Wolf identified the first Trojan, only 13 more had been discovered. With further improvements in instrumentation, the number increased, first slowly and then in a rush. By early 2017, more than 6,500 had been spotted: 4,184 at Jupiter’s L4 point and 2,326 at L5. Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a decorated detector of small bodies within the solar system, has said that the number of Jupiter Trojans may well exceed the total number of objects in the main asteroid belt.
But despite the plethora of discovered Jupiter Trojans, we actually know relatively little about them. Most of our observations have been made with Earth-based telescopes. And although astronomers have discovered fewer Trojans in the L5 cloud than in the L4 cloud, this could be a result of observational biases in their coverage."
Referring to the Trojans and the Greeks, I was curious if Lucy had some avoidance capabilities should it encounter something unexpected during the journeys. The history of
navigating through uncharted water has improved somewhat over the years.