combo question about outer space?

Question

why is that the voyager hasn´t crashed yet? there are a lot of bodies floating in space.

what makes the comets go without stopping?

when the pathfinder landed on mars, it was carrying a kind of parachute and airbags. why is that, when there is no gravity there?. what made it land upright and never was an obstacle to impede its mission?. I read that it had a drill to make holes in rocks too, but isn´t it that too much fantasy?
I really apreciate your time and sorry about my english.

Answer 1

Objects in space are much more widely separated than you might think, especially once you get beyond the Asteroid Belt. Yes, there are lots of icy and rocky bodies out there but space is vast, there's a lot of emptiness between objects.

The motion of everything in the universe is controlled by gravity. Comets are constantly pulled and pushed by the sun's gravity as well as other objects in the solar system. A body will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. There's nothing in space to make a comet stop. The presence of anything in space only means that it will continue moving... unless it directly hits something, like Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 did when it hit Jupiter.

There is gravity on Mars. Every body in space has some gravity. The larger or more dense the body, the more gravity it has. The gravity on Mars is less than that on Earth but it definitely has gravity.

Every interplanetary mission is part careful planning and detailed research and part luck. The Mars rovers were balanced to land upright. It worked on both of them. There were a million things that could've gone wrong but most of them didn't go wrong... so lucky for us we have two functioning landers still roaming the surface of Mars.

Yes, the landers have abrasion tools (not sure they're still working) to take samples from rocks. It was science fiction at one time but not any more. Even some of the early landers on Mars and Venus from the US and what was then the USSR had tools to pick up gravel/sand, heat it, and sample the gases.

Answer 2

> why is that the voyager hasn´t crashed yet? there are a lot of bodies floating in space.

Yes there are, but they are relatively small and far apart, compared to the vastness of interplanetary space. Because of that vastness, space can be considered almost completely "empty." It's practically impossible to hit something in space unless you're aiming directly for it.

> what makes the comets go without stopping?

Gravity. It's the same force that makes the planets go without stopping. The big difference is that comets travel in very long, thin orbits; while the planets go more or less in circles.

Once in a while, a comet will run into a planet (as happened with Jupiter a few years ago); or, more often, into the sun (because all comets' orbits take them fairly close to the sun).

> when the pathfinder landed on mars, it was carrying a kind of parachute and airbags. why is that, when there is no gravity there?

There IS gravity there--it's just weaker than the earth's gravity. Many people hear the expression, "there is no gravity in space," and they assume that there is no gravity anywhere except on earth. But the truth is, all large bodies (planets, moons, stars) have their own gravity. The only place where there is "no" gravity, is in regions of space that are far away from all large bodies.

> what made it land upright...

It didn't--it bounced and tumbled and rolled when it hit the ground. It was folded up into a "tetrahedron" shape (imagine 4 triangles glued together at their edges). The tetrahedron was designed to open up like the petals of a flower, so that just in case it was not right-side-up, the "petals" would push it over into an upright position.

> ...and never was an obstacle to impede its mission?

The first "obstacle" it encountered was Mars! Remember that space is nearly empty because of its vastness.

> I read that it had a drill to make holes in rocks too.

I don't believe the Pathfinder mission (in 1997) had such a drill. But the two MER robots which are currently exploring Mars, each have a "Rock Abrasion Tool" which can grind a rock's surface.

Answer 3

sorry to say, but i dont really know what the voyager is so i can't answer that question. As for for comets, they were once orbiting in an ourt cloud and they were nocked out of it into the inner solar system. The basic principal that an object will continue its motion unless a force acts upon it is what keeps it goin. Along with hte suns gravity keeps it in orbit.
And there is gravity on mars.... since gravity is created by mass, mars does has gravity and since it is bigger than the moon it has more gravity than an object about that size. It also has an atmoshpere so the parachute would work the same way it would on earth, it is just that the atmospheres contain different amounts of different gases.Im not too sure about the design of the pathfinder and how it landed up right but i do know that it had an pyramid shaped airbag system to make it bounce on the martian surface until it made a safe stop. As for the robot that we sent to mars, no it is not fantasy. It was built so it could take and analyze rock samples. It also had several microscopes built in as well. Hope that this helps.

Answer 4

Even though there is are a lot of objects in our solar system (asteroids, meteors, etc.) there is even more empty space.
Even the Cassini probe flew right through the rings of Saturn on its approach to that planet and didn't hit anything larger than a pea (and Saturn's rings are a lot more crowded than interplanetary space.

Anything travelling in space is controlled by gravity - the sun keeps the planets and comets in orbit around it. So the comets (and everything else) don't stop because there is nothing to stop them (no friction, no competing gravitational fields, no brakes).

There IS gravity on Mars (I don't know where you go the idea there was no gravity there, Mars is more massive than the moon and has a surface gravity that is about one third that of Earth's. So to land softly they used parachutes and air bags to cushion the landing.
It landed upright using a stabilizer program and hydraulics on the craft to position it upright before it deployed the rover. There were all kinds of obstacles to the rover, rocks and craters and soft soil - it only moved a few meters a day to make sure it was safe.
They used a Rock Abrasion Tool (called a RAT) to drill small holes into rocks to take mineral samples of the material below the oxidized surface.
I don't think this is fantasy, they use remote-control diving units to search the ocean bottom and take samples, and that is just as hard (if not more difficult).

Answer 5

not quite sure what your talking about with the voyager crashing. But comets and meteors for that matter go without stoping because of momentum. In space there is near zero gravity when in empty space. When a commet nears a star or planet gravity acts on the comet and pulls it near. Many comets have enough velocity to break the gravitational pull of most large bodies, and continue on their path.

On mars there is gravity, but less than there is here on earth. The parachute was use to slow its decent onto the planet. When the rover got to a certain altitude it cut from the chute and deployed the airbags. and bounced and rolled till it stopped. WHen it did stop the protective covering unfolded in such a way that no matter what way the rover was facing it would always be upwright.
The rover did run into several obsticles, but it had 6 wheels mounted on piviting "axles" that allowed it to cover difficult terain.
It did drill into the rock, and it isnt science fiction, it just carried an onboard drill and when found a rock of interest it just broke the trusty drill and got to work.

hope that helped

Answer 6

Combo answer:

Space is big and really, really empty. You have to aim at a planet or asteroid very carefully to hit it. It isn't like the movies at all. In movies you have to dodge swarms of asteroids. In reality, you have to work very hard to find and hit one. Even inside the asteroid belt you could not see more than one asteroid at a time. It isn't like the movies where there are swarms of hundreds that you can see all at the same time. It is more like one asteroid here and another one over there but so far away that you can't see it without a telescope, and all the others even farther away than that.

Comets go on moving for the same reasons that planets do. They are just coasting in the frictionless vacuum of space on the speed they got from the formation of the solar system.

Mars does have gravity; all planets do. So does the Sun and Moon and even asteroids. And pathfinder did have a kind of drill, called the rock abrasion tool, that did drill very shallow holes. By shallow I mean holes not nearly as deep as they were wide.

Answer 7

You should really apologize about your miniscule knowledge of space. First of all, it is unlikely that if and when Voyager does crash, that we will know because we lost/are losing radio contact with the probe. And the area between two objects is so vast it is unlikly it will even have that fate...

FYI, there is gravity on mars. To be precise, the gravity of mars is exactly .38 that of earths. And there have been many obsticals in its way, and it has its own system that helps it navigate obsticals with out human interferance... And we have pictures and videos of it drilling into the rocks... and how would that be "too much fantasy"? It seems completly realistic to me...

Answer 8

Comets go without stopping because they have their own orbit.

Answer 9

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