I'm going to postpone the motivation for this question because the question itself involves no complicated maths and may well have a very simple solution so I don't want to put anyone off with high falutin' symbols.

Here's the question. I have a smooth curve $c \colon (0,1) \to \mathbb{R}^2$ which does not intersect the $x$-axis. As $t \to 0$, this curve approaches the $x$-axis. I want to find out if it has a point of impact. At my disposal, I have any smooth function $f \colon \mathbb{R}^2 \to \mathbb{R}$ which is constant along the $x$-axis. I know that for any such $f$, $f \circ c \colon (0,1) \to \mathbb{R}$ extends to a smooth function $[0,1) \to \mathbb{R}$ (that is, all one-sided derivatives exist at the origin and are the limits of the corresponding derivatives as we approach the origin) with value $f(0,0)$ at $0$. So:

Is there some $f$ (satisfying the condition) such that the composition $f \circ c$ tells me that $c$ approaches a particular point on the $x$-axis?

If the answer to that is "yes", then my follow-up question is about the derivatives of $c$ at the point of approach.

Here are some comments and partial results:

1. I'm allowed to use any information about the compositions $f \circ c$: their values, their derivatives, and so forth.

2. The $y$-value of $c$ easily extends to a smooth function $[0,1) \to \mathbb{R}$ since the second projection $\mathbb{R}^2 \to \mathbb{R}$ is one of our detectors. Moreover, it extends taking the value $0$ at $t = 0$.

3. I can show that the $x$-value of $c$ is bounded as $t$ approaches $0$. If it weren't, I could stick bump functions along the image of $c$ with disjoint support and that were $0$ on the $x$-axis. As they have disjoint support, their sum, call it $f$, is a smooth function and is at the disposal of my detection agency. So there is some sequence $(t_n) \to 0$ such that $f \circ c(t_n) = 1$, but $f(0,0) = 0$ so this violates my condition.

4. I can show that if $c$ approaches the $x$-axis with any sort of speed then I can detect its point of impact (and all derivatives). To do this, I use the function $g \colon (x,y) \mapsto x y$. So long as some derivative of the (extended) $y$-value of $c$ is non-zero at $0$, I can use this to find out the $x$-value by differentiating $g \circ c$ that many times.

5. If $c$ approaches the $x$-axis infinitely slowly, has a point of impact, and the $x$-value extends to a smooth function $[0,1) \to \mathbb{R}$ (so then $c$ extends to a smooth function $[0,1) \to \mathbb{R}^2$) then I cannot detect the actual point of impact. This is because I can use the chain rule to find the value of any derivative of $f \circ c$ and each term vanishes because either it involves a derivative of the $y$-value (assumed zero) or it involves a pure $x$-derivative of $f$ (zero by assumption on $f$ as we're then on the $x$-axis).

So it seems to me that it's a reasonable conjecture that I can't show that $c$ has a point of impact, if it approaches infinitely slowly. However, the above is not a proof of that fact.

Motivation I'm trying to finish off the details of an example of a Froelicher space (http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Froelicher+space). The space in question, let's call it $X$, is the quotient of the plane by the $x$-axis. By the rules for taking quotients, the smooth functions on this space are simply the smooth functions on $\mathbb{R}^2$ which are constant along the $x$-axis. I want to work out the smooth curves. Let $c \colon \mathbb{R} \to X$ be a smooth curve. It's straightforward to show that $c$ lifts to a smooth curve $U_c \to \mathbb{R}^2$, where $U_c$ is the complement of the preimage of the collapsed point. As $U_c$ is (easily shown to be) open, it decomposes as a union of intervals. On each interval, $c$ is a smooth curve in $\mathbb{R}^2$ which approaches the $x$-axis at the end-points. So the question is as to what can be said as $c$ gets near one of these end-points. That's the source of this question.