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seanyseanerson t1_ixaisic wrote

Reply to comment by Kerfudamapa in Just how dark is deep space? by ArmchairSpinDoctor

So to travel safely in space I guess the ship would have to emit an insane amount of light in all directions to properly monitor for potential collisions. The odds of one are low I guess, but you'd want to know if an object was heading your way.

Perhaps a sort of infrared sonar would be more useful and energy efficient? I dunno.

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Arusht t1_ixb2ubr wrote

Like.. insanely low. So low, that I have no idea where you’re at in the world, but if I got into a car right now, closed my eyes, and drove in a straight line.. I would probably have a better chance of hitting your house.

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imtoooldforreddit t1_ixbi4oj wrote

Space is really empty

If you're picturing dodging like in star wars flying through asteroid fields, that's not what space is like

In our asteroid belt, average distance from an asteroid to the next closest asteroid is about 100,000 miles

For the probes that have gone through the asteroid belt, they had absolutely no way to know if there was an asteroid coming, because the risk of even a single one was basically negligible.

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Saerali t1_ixbsyqj wrote

Oh didn't know it was THAT spread out. How packed would saturn's rings be ?

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Exatex t1_ixbxwxj wrote

Very packed - so packed that although the rings are just 10-100m thick, they block most light going though them

run fact edit: Saturns rings are some of the thinnest things known to us. They have a diameter of ~1 million kilometers.

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tizuby t1_ixciixl wrote

You're off by a factor of 6 with average asteroid distance - and that's just in the most dense parts of our asteroid belt (about ~1,000,000 km or ~620,000mi).

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_AlreadyTaken_ t1_ixb1cok wrote

Radar but space is a lot of empty. The biggest problem is likely micrometorites and high energy atomic scale particles chewing away at you.

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kendiggy t1_ixcgntm wrote

SONAR (SOund Navigation And Ranging) wouldn't work since sound relies on having an atmosphere or body of water/molecules to travel. RADAR (RAdio Detection And Ranging) would be much more effective because radio waves can actually travel through space.

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seanyseanerson t1_ixcsfrh wrote

Thank you. I was thinking of something that sent out pulses of light to read reflections in the same way sonar does but hadn't thought that radar already does the job just fine!

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Webs101 t1_ixckas4 wrote

If you’re flying in space, you’re not relying on the visual spectrum to avoid collisions. Radar will work just fine.

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