Talk:List of landing ellipses on extraterrestrial bodies

Table Template
Drives me crazy otherwise.


 * how did a comet impact event became a landing? Can you find any source that compares it with actual landing? What's the uncertainty ellipse there? Or you think the aliens sent it to crash on Jupiter and calculated a landing ellipse? That's just OR, and is not comparable with actual spacecraft. Artem.G (talk) 15:02, 24 January 2024 (UTC)


 * It's a question of ephemeris refinement, itself a major probablistic factor. At the beginning of the SL9 saga it was not known precisely on which day it would impact, Jupiter, much less which hemisphere. Furthermore impact is impact is impact; we've used airbags and we've used water. For that matter a cursory look at Splashdown, List of space debris fall incidents, and List of landings on extraterrestrial bodies shows no impact/landing ellipses projections whatsoever, so this is a very rich vein. (You have to know where to position the recovery ships, and where an asteroid heading for us might hit.) In summary, landings are impact events, the second question is moot, the uncertainty initially comprised the entirety of Jupiter, and no, I do not think that that SL9 was guided. The historic calculations of impact/landing zones are what concerns us here. (Good luck digging up the Soviet records.) kencf0618 (talk) 17:02, 24 January 2024 (UTC)
 * well, by that logic you can include any impact event to the table. There is exactly zero sources I've found that talk about "landing ellipse", "landing footprint" or "landing zone" and impact of SL. Artem.G (talk) 17:48, 24 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Impact: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1994IAUC.6023....1H/abstract
 * Prediction: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1994IAUC.6026....1M/abstract kencf0618 (talk) 01:39, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

columns
should cross-range and down-range axes be sortable separately? Or if not, should the semi-major be the sort key? Arlo James Barnes 08:37, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Semi-major, if anything. kencf0618 (talk) 03:35, 24 January 2024 (UTC)