(urth) grumble at wolfe comment made attached to guardianarticle

[Jeff Wilson]

On 2/9/2011 9:59 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> From: "Jeff Wilson" <jwilson at io.com>
>> On 2/9/2011 6:26 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
>>> I think horseshoes are a bit problematic. If you look at Cruithne's
>>> orbit, its actual distance from Earth varies on a short scale with a
>>> period of one year. Over a longer term, the average distance varies.
>>> Since Cruithne's orbital period is one year, there's no room for
>>> meaningful six-year conjunctions.
>>
>> That's because tiny Cruithne is too small to influence Earth in a
>> detectable way. Janus and Epimethius, however, are similar in mass and
>> do their thing in four years.
>
> But their orbital period around Saturn is only 0.7 days... so those four
> years are equivalent to about 2000 years on Blue!

That may depend heavily on odd power functions, like the orbital period 
formula earlier; the dual orbit discovery was pre-internet (1978) so I'm 
having a devil of a time locating anything analytical about it.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >