[SR2Z]

My guess is that small objects like this suffer greatly from the 3-body problem, and multiple trajectories are generated from various starting points inside our measured error bars for the current states of these objects. Small inaccuracies compound over the years.

[Galatians4_16]

n-body problem.

The planets, sun and all planetoids orbit the barycenter of the solar system, which in our case happens to be inside the sun. They all affect each other, making more than 3 bodies problematic.

[mmooss]

> My guess is that small objects like this suffer greatly from the 3-body problem

What bodies? My impression is that the only objects around Earth with enough gravity to significantly impact trajectories are the Earth and Moon. Will the other small objects have any significant gravitational impact on this body?

I also understand that in cislunar space, the Earth-Moon dynamic does create a three-body problem and trajectories are fundamentally unpredictable, with some exceptions. I wonder how that affects objects such as this one if they pass through the Moon's gravitational well.

[SR2Z]

Clicking the link, I found this visualization of the approximate orbit:

https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2024%...

This orbit is around the sun (as asteroids tend to) and the apoapsis is closer to Jupiter's orbit than Mars.

[pclmulqdq]

Also, the gravity of asteroids or small planetary bodies like moons that it passes close to will have some small effects that can add up over a long time period.

[tofof]

Even if you're just doing a 2-body problem around the moon you'll get wildly wrong orbits over a timespan of just months if you treat the moon as a point mass (the way that's relatively safe to do with Earth, in comparison). Lunar mascons are so strong you can't even rely on a plumbob to point straight down if you want just tenth-of-a-degree accuracy. These perturbations are so severe there are only effectively only four (instead of 90) stable inclinations for low lunar orbits.

Literally every body in the solar system acts on every other body at all times. All asteroids in the asteroid belt are perturbed by Mars and Jupiter, right? Except if you recognize the need to include Mars in calculating their trajectories, you need immediately to at least also account for the 4 Gallilean moons, who sum to about the same mass as Mars, and now you have a 7-body problem. You won't get correct results on trajectories of Earth approaches if you discount the mass of our moon, nor if you discount the rest of the asteroid belt (4% of our moon's mass)... etc.

[baq]

Gravity has unlimited range, the patched conics method you think of is a good approximation on short time spans, but breaks down surprisingly quickly. Keep in mind the Sun moves all the water in Earth’s oceans all the time…

[slashdev]

The Sun, Jupiter, Saturn are the main ones. Depends on the orbit as to how much influence they have.