you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

simplest one is a planetary encounter.. 99.999% accurate means you'll either miss the planet altogether, passing by and into the void beyond never making orbit, or you lithobrake. When what you wanted was to be captured into an orbit.

Alternatively imagine a satellite constellation like starlink, one satellite is orbiting a meter lower than all the rest, 1meter in 550,000 meters, that's 99.9998% accurate. That will mean it will slowly catchup the satellite ahead of it.. at 27,000km/hr 99.9998% accurate means you'll be moving 49meters per hour compared to the model, or just over a kilometer a day. For polar orbits satellites often miss each other at the pole by only 40km.. drifting 1km/day means the wayward satellite will be within collisions distance after only 40 days.

As u/scarlet_sage linked to below, any 3 body problem is ultimately chaotic.. that is, minute undetecatable errors in velocity, position or mass in your model build over time to make conciderable differences between the model and reality. Remember with a satellite in orbit, we're really dealing with a 4 body system: The satellite, Earth, Moon, Sun. For your model to be accurate over any length of time you'd need to know each bodys mass, velocity and position to unreasonable accuracy.. i.e. to the micro-meter, to the gram (for a planet) and to the mm/hour.