Some of these orbits intersects the Earth's surface in time shorter than 20 years for a particular initial geometry of interacting bodies.
This has prompted the suggestion that meteorites spend a significant fraction of their time as small meteoroids migrating within the asteroid belt until their orbits intersect a resonance i.e., a region in the belt where they experience strong gravitational perturbations by the planets, particularly Jupiter that puts the meteoroids in Earth-crossing orbits.
I think the fact that their orbits intersect every now and again - that's just a co-incidence.
The line of intersection of the planes is called the line of the nodes, being the two points where the Moon's orbit intersects the ecliptic plane.
Each planet's orbit intersects the ecliptic plane in two points called nodes; if inferior conjunction occurs at a time when the planet is near a node, a transit of the Sun can occur.
When the moon's orbit intersects the ecliptic (the the sun's apparent path) at new moon or full moon, it causes a solar or lunar eclipse, respectively.
For a number of years during each peak, the orbit intersects the so-called plasma sheet--a thin region in Earth's magnetosphere that contains many electrically charged particles from the sun.
Instead, eclipses only occur during two eclipse seasons each year when the Sun appears to pass the points, called lunar nodes, where the orbits intersect.
For non-autonomous case, the Melnikov technique is used to determine the critical parameter at which the homoclinic orbits intersect transversally.
For the purpose of precise orbit determination and the recovery of geophysical parameters of interest, crossover analysis was developed to obtain relevant measurements separated in time at the same geographic location where ascending and descending ground tracks of the satellite orbits intersect (Shum et al., 1990).
Earth, Venus, and the Sun will line up in a row when the nodes of the planetary orbits intersect on 5-6 June 2012, but there won't be any cataclysmic events.[11] Anyone who insists that bad things will happen as a result of this is scamming and is someone who can join the long line of Doomsday prophets who have foretold many non-events.
