Talk:List of asteroid close approaches to Earth in 2020

Column for uncertainty region[edit]

After the column for "Nominal distance (in LD)" should we include a column of "uncertainty region (in ±km)? This number would normally be below 1000km. Too many people on the net think ANY known "Potentially hazardous asteroid" on a close approach can impact Earth. You can use the JPL SBDB (MaxDistance – MinDistance) * AU / 2 for the value. I can make the changes, but did not want to violate any consensus. -- Kheider (talk) 16:56, 9 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea to include it. I'd say give the error as a percentage, so that it's useful for all the measurements currently given (km, miles, AU, LD), and avoids misinterpretation ("ooooh look at all those zeros that must be huge"). Also, unless we are going to show different errors for + and -, I would probably stick to just the difference between nominal and min, rather than max and min, since it's not a completely flat distribution (nominal is not the halfway point between max and min) i.e. error is JPL SBDB (NominalDistance - MinDistance) / NominalDistance. A nice side effect of calculating it this way is that you can get the info from the JPL close approach data page, which lists all asteroids together, rather than needing to look up each asteroid individually. Very handy if you're retro-fitting new data to an existing table. Another thought, uncertainty already has a very specific meaning, so probably better to use a different term. Perhaps if we drop the AU/km/miles column, we could just have nominal LD and min LD columns instead? This would also avoid the table being too wide (it's already a bit unfriendly to narrow screen devices), and gets rid of the need to calculate anything... but maybe a step too far? Rafflesgluft (talk) 15:10, 2 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Have been thinking about this overnight. How about we call the new column "Accuracy"? In that case the calc becomes simply [EDIT] MinDistance / NominalDistance, and would be shown as a percentage? E.g.

2020 SN5 min=.00134 AU, nominal=0.00135 AU, Accuracy = 99.3%
2020 SQ4 min=.00235 AU, nominal=0.00236 AU, Accuracy = 99.6%
2020 SO (Dec) min=.00033 AU, nominal=0.00034 AU, Accuracy = 97.1%
2020 SO (Feb) min=.00142 AU, nominal=0.00149 AU, Accuracy = 95.3%

Rafflesgluft (talk) 11:21, 3 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]