For example, like if an asteroid was projected to pass Earth but not until 20 years from now, how do we calculate this? How is that even possible to know?
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When there’s (basically) no air resistance like in outer space, you can use some relatively simple equations developed by Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler back in the 16th/17th centuries to get how their orbits (position as a function of time) for basically forever, all you have to do then is set the ones for earth and the object equal to each other and solve for the time
Even if the equations get too complicated to solve with pen and paper you can just plug them into a computer and it’ll figure it out that way numerically
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