Podcast Episode 108: Practical Application of Uncertainty – Getting Around the Solar System

Getting around means
You have to know where stuff is.
Do we? And how well?

In this episode, I revisit the idea of “uncertainty” in our inability to know stuff to an arbitrary precision, but hopefully in a more interesting way. I talk about Superman flying to Mars, satellite orbits, why asteroids are given probabilities of impacting Earth and what goes into those, and I talk about how we plan observations by spacecraft when we don’t know exactly where the stuff is that we actually want to observe.

I’ve been busy working on another project (thanks Expat, Steve) that will hopefully come out at the end of the month, so this is a bit shorter of an episode at a little over 20 minutes. And a day late because of the massive Hoagland post from yesterday.