They were never considered stranded, except maybe for the few days between Starliner’s empty return and the Crew-9 Dragon’s arrival. Certainly not for 9 months.
Report: ended up scuttling the plans. I’ve had a few late nights in a row, and the transparency was bad enough to give me a good excuse to sleep instead. We’ll get them next time, team.
Nice work! Does the uncertainty come from error bars in the observed trajectory? I would’ve thought an asteroid’s path is pretty easy to pinpoint with enough information.
Yep, even the best telescopes have a bit of inaccuracy in their measurements, and we haven't been tracking it for long enough to determine its orbit with enough precision to know its exact trajectory.
As someone who doesn’t know or understand any of this math/physics. Would you mind doing a super simple explanation of how the calculation works and why you chose certain factors?
Might be a dumb thing to ask but just curious and want to understand more.
D_nominal, D_min, and D_max represent the most likely, minimum, and maximum (well technically not maximum, just 3 standard deviations from most likely, of which 99.7% of trajectories will fall within) distance 2024 YR4 will pass from the center of the Moon (NOT the surface). They're taken from the linked NASA website. R_moon is the radius of the Moon.
L_impact is length of the impact corridor (the line where 2024 YR4 could impact the Moon). Since it doesn't pass through the center of the Moon, it's not simply 2*R_moon and so we need a simple formula to calculate it from R_moon and D_min.
P(x) is a probability density function; it's the black curve you can see. It shows, for a given trajectory along the line of possible trajectories, how likely 2024 YR4 is to follow that trajectory. It's shifted a bit from the center since the most likely trajectories are not exactly centered on the Moon. P_impact is the area of P(x) that falls within +/- L_impact, AKA the probability that the trajectory will intersect the Moon, AKA the impact probability.
The rest is just some graphing stuff that doesn't matter to the calculation.
AKA the probability that the trajectory will intersect the Moon, AKA the impact probability.
(Disclaimer, I know close to nothing about these) Am I pedantic about a useless detail or does it significantly change the probability if we consider that an object may still impact the moon after “missing it” if it comes close enough to be captured and come back after a semi orbit? Or do the relative speeds makes this extremely unlikely?
Do we know if the Moon will be in the correct phase in it’s orbit when 2024 YR4 comes by? I didn’t notice a term to account for that, but I’m not too familiar with Desmos.
Just 6 light-years away, Barnard’s Star is a well-studied 10-billion-year-old M dwarf with a mass of 0.16 solar mass. Finding exoplanets around Barnard’s Star has been something of a white whale for astronomers for more than half a century; starting in the 1960s, researchers have claimed to have spotted various planets around Barnard’s Star, from distant Jupiter-mass companions to close-in super-Earths. Each of these claims has been refuted.
Now, the white whale appears to have been caught at last. Just last November, researchers reported the discovery of a planet orbiting Barnard’s Star with a period of 3.154 days. The data hinted at the presence of three other planets, but these candidates could not be confirmed. In a new research article published today, Ritvik Basant (University of Chicago) and collaborators leveraged years of data to confirm that Barnard’s Star hosts not just one, but four planets.
Good summary, but to everyone else reading this, it’s really worth it to read the article. It’s short and yet, frankly, fascinating. It discusses the methods used to identify the exoplanets and their orbital periods.
astronomy
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