Dr Chesley said: “For tracking asteroids, our data source are these telescopes that are constantly ploughing the skies, looking for objects, and whenever they find something they send it in and we update the orbit.
“So we don’t update the orbits necessarily when we want to. We do that when we get more data.
“Sometimes objects are so interesting that we’d say, ‘Hey, we need to know where this is’.
“Maybe because it’s threatening the Earth or maybe because a space mission wants to go there. So then we’ll point the telescope where it’s supposed to be.
“Now, if those predictions for where it’s supposed to be are very approximate, they might have to do a lot of work to recover the asteroid.”
source: express.co.uk