English

An Introduction to Celestial Mechanics

The aim of this book is to bridge the considerable gap between standard undergraduate treatments of celestial mechanics, which rarely advance much beyond two-body orbit theory, and full-blown graduate treatments, such as that by Murray & Dermott. The material presented here is intended to be intelligible to advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students. A knowledge of elementary Newtonian mechanics is assumed. However, those non-elementary topics in mechanics that are needed to account for the motions of celestial bodies (e.g., gravitational potential theory, motion in rotating reference frames, Lagrangian mechanics, Eulerian rigid body rotation theory) are derived in the text. This is entirely appropriate, since these many of these topics were originally developed in order to investigate specific problems in celestial mechanics (often, the very problems that they are used to examine in this book.) It is taken for granted that readers are familiar with the fundamentals of integral and differential calculus, ordinary differential equations, and linear algebra. On the other hand, vector analysis plays such a central role in the study of celestial motion that a brief, but fai

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