In his entertaining and informative article, Mr. Chang produces a few figures on the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and then adds this:
S. Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission to Pluto wrote that when his spacecraft passed through the asteroid belt in 2006, the chance of collision was “almost vanishingly small — far less than one in one billion.”So, Lucas was exaggerating, and our spacecraft heading to the outer planets were never in jeopardy. I feel much better. But what about that asteroid monster?