Oh no, it's me again. I am still trying to figure out what find_orb is doing. I am missing some basic explanation of what's shown in the GUI. I searched in this group and found discussion points related to my questions, but most of them sounded as if all of you already know what you are talking about... I don't. Also I checked the projectpluto web pages, but couldn't find the answers. Maybe I overlooked them. Anyway: here are a few questions:
1. What is P and Q?
2. What really does the 'full step' button do? How does it compare to 'auto-solve' - is that the same as pressing 'full step' a large number of times? How does it differ to 'Herget step' (yes, I did read the page on the Herget method - but what does the button really do?).
3. Sometimes the text in the 'orbital elements' box turns red. What does that mean?
4. What's R1 and R2? Is it 'perhelion' and 'aphelion'? I often get R2 > 10000 AU - what does that mean? That the solution is doubtful?
5. I am not yet sure about the 'epoch' field. Will it compute Kepler elements at the given epoch from the observations? I.e. if I have three Earth flybys, will it propagate the orbit determined by the current observations to the elements at that epoch?
6. Is there a way to find the closest flyby times of an NEO? Or do I need to guess when they are and enter that in 'epoch'?
7. What is 'start ranging' really doing? I had the feeling that it's the same as 'Monte Carlo' (which I think I do understand) - but I get different results.
8. What happens when I load data? Is it doing a 'full step' or an 'auto-solve'? Something does happen, but it's not clear to me what.
The reason I am asking all these things is that I try to plot a ground plot of the potential intersection of 2011 AG5's path with the Earth in 2040. But I don't get any intersection so far. And anything I type in doesn't compare to what I find on the NEODyS web pages for the object for the next close flybys (
http://newton.dm.unipi.it/neodys/index.php?pc=1.1.8&n=2011AG5). Propably I don't understand how to use find_orb properly yet.
Thanks in advance for any help!
Detlef.