this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
36 points (97.4% liked)
Space & Astronomy
1000 readers
169 users here now
A community to discuss space & astronomy through a STEM lens
Rules
- Be respectful and inclusive. This means no harassment, hate speech, or trolling.
- Engage in constructive discussions by discussing in good faith.
- Foster a continuous learning environment.
Also keep in mind, mander.xyz's rules on politics
Please keep politics to a minimum. When science is the focus, intersection with politics may be tolerated as long as the discussion is constructive and science remains the focus. As a general rule, political content posted directly to the instanceโs local communities is discouraged and may be removed. You can of course engage in political discussions in non-local communities.
Related Communities
๐ญ Science
- !curiosityrover@lemmy.world
- !earthscience@mander.xyz
- !esa@feddit.nl
- !nasa@lemmy.world
- !perseverancerover@lemmy.world
- !physics@mander.xyz
- !space@beehaw.org
- !space@lemmy.world
๐ Engineering
๐ Art and Photography
Other Cool Links
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If my logical thinking serves me well, there's no chance to survive interstellar travel. Look at thar thing! Its full of craters. It's been bombarded by tiny super fast collisions. How can anything survived that in space and keep people alive too?
It has been out there for ~~billions of~~ ~150 million years to get that way.
How many years did you think it would take us to get to a habitable planet?
The ship would be a living ship for a long long time. The space station already has been hit by micro meteors. Imagine what would happen to a larger ship away from the protection of the earth.
When we consider that it's about 5 miles (8 km) long and 2 miles (3.5 km) wide, then some of those craters took good hits. I assume any future interstellar craft would need some sort of force field or be armor plated to protect from it from such collisions.
You're not wrong about this thing being bombarded by tiny collisions, but we should note that the impacting bodies that made the craters visible in these images were a lot larger than dust or sand grains. It's not surprising to see an object like this, within the asteroid belt, covered in simple bowl-shaped craters. From what the New Horizons probe to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt has seen, however, even dust grains are actually pretty sparse in the outer solar system. Even if there actually is a "second Kuiper Belt" as some of the NH team proposes, it isn't that dusty. In interstellar space, I would expect dust grains to be even rarer, let alone sand or pebbles.
That being said, interstellar probes will definitely need some form of protection from hypervelocity impacts, however rare they may be. That's one good reason we should be looking seriously at more modest (and more feasible) proposals for spacecraft that will reach large but attainable distances beyond the heliosphere (say, 75 billion kilometres out from the Sun). The best way to verify the dustiness of nearby interstellar space is to measure it directly. Scouts have their value.