Amateur astronomers, long major players in ascertaining the
exact orbits of asteroids, are likely to play less and less of a role as professionals turn their powerful telescopes to the objects once considered too mundane for academics to study at all.
The asteroid crosses Jupiter's path every six years, but owing to their co-orbital resonance, they never come closer than 176 million km, far enough to avoid major disturbances to
the orbit of the asteroid, although Jupiter's gravity is essential to keeping the planet and Bee - Zed in a 1:1 retrograde resonance.
The orbit of the asteroids is marked by a blue ellipse.
By studying
the orbit of the asteroid and examining its remains, researchers hope to reconstruct more details about conditions in the early solar system.
Tobias Hinse: — basics of celestial mechanics; — practical hands - on with the free / open - source MERCURY orbit integration program on test cases: — compute
the orbit of an asteroid (mean - motion resonance and eccentricity pumping); — compute the wobble - motion of the host star of an exoplanet system and the corresponding RV signal (using 1, 2, 3 planets); — compute the orbits of a Kepler multi-planet system using initial elements from a real AJ / ApJ papers.
Our primary assignment is to track
the orbit of the asteroid.
With that much computing power you could predict
the orbits of every asteroid over the size of a Volkswagen found in our solar system several years into the future.