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> what if I'm tracking objects in interplanetary space?

I guess you'd just want to store the orbital information of that object, as it probably won't stay at a fixed position.

Indeed; does that mean such a database would need to run an n-body simulation to determine where one object is compared to another at a given time?

That would require arbitrary telemetry and possibly non-deterministic solution, or something like SPICE(https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/toolkit.html) which is a bit too far outside of 'database' domain.

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