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How many cosmic dust particles hit Voyager in a million years?
OK folks, inspired by a recent question here, can anyone estimate how many cosmic dust particles will hit a Voyager spacecraft in a million years.
My estimate is 200 billion, which is about 60,000 per square millimetre on the leading surface. Quite a sandblasting!
Based on the wiki article on cosmic dust, voyager moving at about 16,000 kmph and a diameter of a metre or so.
Any advances on that figure?
This question just started out as a bit of fun to quantify an answer to a question by another poster here. But the numbers are actually quite alarming. I find it extraordinary that there is no attention drawn to this issue in an age where people are seriously suggesting "microprobes" coursing through interstellar space.
4 Answers
- Satan ClawsLv 73 years ago
<QUOTE>Quite a sandblasting! </QUOTE>
I dunno. Can you give a comparison to something with which people are familiar, say the number of grains of sand that hit a person over a time span of 30 years?
<QUOTE>how many cosmic dust particles will hit a Voyager spacecraft in a million years. My estimate is 200 billion,</QUOTE>
I'm guessing that you calculated the number of dust particles (whatever size that is) on a column of space vacuum whose length corresponds to the distance covered by Voyager and the width corresponds to the width of the craft. The only thing missing there is the number of dust particles per unit volume.
