I confess I don’t know much about orbital mechanics, but I do know that you can’t send a spacecraft from the earth to the moon without several course corrections. So my question would be with all the gravitational influences acting on that asteroid, how do we know its trajectory with any degree of certainty over that time period?
Al Gore said so?
they asked the mayans
Essentially.
This represents current orbital path with as high an accuracy as they can get. Though most things in space are predictable enough for estimates of location. Likely it’ll be off a bit.
Reasonably, if current western civ continues on its path, we’ll be backwater nations dealing with basic infrastructure issues and won’t be able to deal with it. The Asians, notably Chinese and Russians will probably be the ones to rescue the world. So far they’re the only ones interested in running a country that doesn’t try and destroy itself.
The guys who do Global Warming predictions figured it out in their spare time.
The comparison of the asteroid’s orbital path to that of the Lunar bound spaecraft is false. The spaecraft needs to do course corrections for a variety of reasons unrelated to the ability to accurately predict orbital paths of a relatively more inert body such as an asteroid. The Earth and the field of its significant gravitational influence upon an asteroid are far far greater than the aiming points for cis-Lunar trajectory for a spacecraft.