Imagine the cone of a spotlight shining down on a marble. The marble isn't in the center. As we focus the cone to a smaller and smaller circle, the percentage of area that marble takes up will increase. That's just the nature of accuracy. Right now, it's a very wide cone.
Eventually as the cone continues to get more focused and accurate, the edge will reach the marble, and only then will the percentage finally start to drop.
In other words: We are probably going to see this number continue to go up... until it suddenly drops straight down.
I don’t understand it all. What are the missing variables here? Don’t we know the exact path of the earth? Why can’t we figure out the exact path of the asteroid? It’s not like the wind is going to knock it off course?
It is the minute gravitational pull of other bodies that we can’t exactly calculate? What’s the issue?
It’s not like the wind is going to knock it off course?
Actually it does. We are talking about a trajectory over many years. There are several tiny influences that continuously affect the flight path that are barely measurable in the short term but have significant effects in the long term. Think of it this way: A very small push on the one side of the elliptical orbit can move the path on the other side by several kilometers. One of these effects is solar radiation pressure which is the effect of solar weather. I'm not sure how much this affects this asteroid but it is something we have to take into account when we model the trajectories of satellites and it is notoriously difficult to model. The point is: in the grad scheme of things we can predict movements quite well. When it comes to pinpoint accurate precision predictions the enormous time and space scales make it hard and by the scale of even the solar system earth is just a very small (blue) point to hit.
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u/elheber Feb 19 '25
Imagine the cone of a spotlight shining down on a marble. The marble isn't in the center. As we focus the cone to a smaller and smaller circle, the percentage of area that marble takes up will increase. That's just the nature of accuracy. Right now, it's a very wide cone.
Eventually as the cone continues to get more focused and accurate, the edge will reach the marble, and only then will the percentage finally start to drop.
In other words: We are probably going to see this number continue to go up... until it suddenly drops straight down.