Is it that difficult to fly through asteroid belts?

Is it that difficult to fly through asteroid belts?

When you think of asteroid belts, you imagine a region of rock and dust, with asteroids as far as the eye can see, where the spaceships must swerve left and right to avoid collisions. That’s true… only in movies.

In reality the asteroid belt is less cluttered than often portrayed. If you were in the middle of an asteroid belt, you probably wouldn’t see any asteroids at all.

If the asteroids were big enough and close enough to pose a danger to a spaceship, they would also be banging into each other, reducing themselves to tiny pieces.

In fact, if you pull all the asteroids in that belt between Mars and Jupiter and weigh them, together they'd only weigh about 4% the mass of Earth's moon.

During 12 missions beyond this belt — most recently NASA’s Juno mission on its way to Jupiter, nothing of significance has ever collided with a spacecraft.

To conclude, there is no danger of asteroids colliding when you are flying through the asteroid belt. But that would make for dull and boring movies and easy video games.

Debunked!