trajectory

noun

1. The path an object takes as it moves.

   “The USA were dominant but, to England’s immense credit, they repeatedly rallied, refusing to fold. Indeed they could conceivably have gone in level at the interval had Naeher not made an acrobatic, stretching, fingertip save to divert Walsh’s 25-yard thunderbolt as it whizzed unerringly on its apparently inexorable trajectory towards the top corner.”

2. The path of a body as it travels through space.
3. The ordered set of intermediate states assumed by a dynamical system as a result of time evolution.
4. (figuratively)A course of development, such as that of a war or career.

   “It is likely that the long evolutionary trajectory of Mycoplasma went from a reductive autotroph to oxidative heterotroph to a cell-wall–defective degenerate parasite. This evolutionary trajectory assumes the simplicity to complexity route of biogenesis, a point of view that is not universally accepted.”