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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7487495" data-attributes="member: 16814">This is... not even wrong.  To attempt to explain, again, both the Earth and the asteroid are orbiting the Sun.  The Earth is in constant motion along it's orbital path, as is the asteroid.  The point of impact is where those two lines cross.  In other words, the asteroid isn't moving towards the Earth, it's moving towards where the Earth is going to be.Imagine trying to hit a moving car with a baseball from the field next to the road the car is travelling along.  If you throw the baseball at the car, you will miss because by the time the baseball arrives at the road, the car will have already traveled past that point.  Instead, you throw the baseball ahead of the car so that when the baseball gets to the road, it meets the car there. In this scenario, the hero is like a wind pushing the baseball after you throw it.  The car is moving so fast that it takes less wind to slow the thrown ball so that the car zooms past the rendezvous than it does to push the ball to the side so that it gets there at the same time but far enough off to one side.  Largely this is because, for reference, the car is huge and moving really fast so that a small change in speed leverages the speed of the car to cause the miss rather than having to push the baseball off target by half the length of the car from zero lateral speed.If you insist on treating Earth as the center point, then the asteroid is going to appear to move under constantly changing acceleration (because it has to include Earth's orbital movement, which is elliptical, alongside it's own highly elliptical orbit, which is going to do weird things -- other planets appear to occasionally do loop-de-loops in the sky, for instance).  You're essentially recreating the problem of predicting planetary motions in an Earth-centric universe, a field of rather complicated mathematical modelling.  There's a reason everything got a lot easier (but not exactly easy) to predict when we moved to a heliocentric model.  Don't ignore Kepler!</blockquote>

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