2016 PG215 vs P/2017 S9 (PANSTARRS)

Tony Dunn's simulator

After importing these two objects in Tony Dunn's orbit simulator, I run a backward simulation, it seems that these two objects reached their minimum distance (about 1.3 million km with a relative velocity about 0.2 km/s) around year 1722

 

I tried to repeat the simulation with Mercury6

Mercury 6 - Clone Generation

100 clones generated for 2016 PG215

	Clones			Target
	mean	sd		mean	sd
q	2.19383272749	0.00011273758		2.19381712	0.000112
e	0.30458368136	6.94602e-05		0.3045753	6.89e-05
i	14.48177635302	0.00100947136		14.48182	0.001
peri	239.08631656434	0.02910871896		239.08509	0.029
node	143.95467584065	0.00332139145		143.95526	0.0033
tp	2457678.38420939	0.0801469034		2457678.38108	0.0813

 

100 clones generated for P/2017 S9 (PANSTARRS)

	Clones			Target
	mean	sd		mean	sd
q	2.19533547065	0.00016184005		2.19530577	0.000163
e	0.30464978716	0.00044947392		0.3046144	0.00045
i	14.13853528807	0.00079956654		14.1385	8e-04
peri	237.90055621894	0.04184388237		237.90083	0.042
node	146.22097511564	0.01186594777		146.22069	0.012
tp	2457958.09135804	0.08433898023		2457958.07442	0.0837

Mercury6 - Simulation parameters

algorithm: BS

output intervals: 10 days

timestep=0.05 days

Mercury6 - Simulation Results

I compared the resulting 10000 clone couples.

Looking at minimum distance, the two best clones behaved like this:

Looking at the mimimum relative velocity, the other two best clones behaved like this:

Clearly, due to the orbit uncertainties, we have a high variance in distance, speed and time, but I wonder whether we can reasonably speculate that the asteroid 2016 PG215 is a fragment of comet P/2017 S9 (PANSTARRS) or whether this is just something occurring by chance.

 

Best wishes,

Alessandro Odasso