Asteroid collision aftermath caught by spacecraft

News story here:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11534216

It is not often you get to see such news regarding asteroidal impacts, which I think is strange when you think about how many of them are out there.

Seanie.

shows how big space is, they're probably a million miles apart so the odds must be pretty low on that front.

stepryan wrote:

shows how big space is, they're probably a million miles apart so the odds must be pretty low on that front.

Well, not really in the asteroid belt, surely...

Seanie_Morris wrote:

stepryan wrote:

shows how big space is, they're probably a million miles apart so the odds must be pretty low on that front.

Well, not really in the asteroid belt, surely...

if you look at the link below to the article in scientific american it suggest 5 million kilometres on average. there maybe be millions of them but the volume of space they occupy is also very large. from reading the asteriod belt probably makes up about 4% of the moon. spread tha over a couple of hundred cublic miles of space and you'd have to go out of your way to collide with one.

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?i...ience-fiction-movies

Thanks for that Stephen, I would have thought a little closer of the order of hundreds of thousands of miles for some, not 5 million.

: blink:

well, its commonly known that if you were standing on an asteroid in the belt, you'd still need a telescope to see the nearest asteroids.