I’m sure many of us remember that epic scene from The Empire Strikes Back, when Han Solo deftly pilots the Millennium Falcom through a dense field of huge, tumbling asteroids. Unfortunately, a real life asteroid field would be decidedly less action packed.
In fact, if you were to pilot a spaceship out into the Asteroid Belt – a circular belt of rocks and minor planets located between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars – you’d be hard pressed to find even a single rock. This is because the objects, although huge in number, are spaced out sparsely in relation to the huge swathe of the Solar System they occupy. And that’s putting it mildly. According to astronomer J. L. Galache, there is, on average, only one sizeable asteroid per every 33 quadrillion cubic miles.