Square root of the sum of the squares of the accuracy of the measuring instrument(s).
I don’t know if anyone will see this since it’s already on page 2 but I’ll put it here anyway since some have wonder about it...
One of my best friends is a RADAR engineer at KSC. I worked with him when I managed a Satellite Communications Earth Terminal on the Eastern Test Range and he was managing the RADAR locations...
I asked him why NASA was unable to track this thing with any kind of accuracy and this was his answer...
“Unless they have improved, their budget was enough to only watch a tiny portion if the sky. The KaBOOM (really, thats the name) project at KSC was only minimally funded to demonstrate a Ka Band interferometric radar but I don’t think it ever became much more than a demonstrator.
Other sites like Arecibo, JPL-Goldstone, the MIT Haystack observatory are so poorly funded by NASA that the gaps in coverage leave ample opportunity for near misses.
Additionally with the shutdown of the USAF (formerly USN) “Space Fence”, we are quite literally sitting ducks awaiting a cosmic surprise.”
http://www.nasa.gov/.../engineering/technology/KaBOOM.html