Search results for "Kepler's equation"
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Remarks on quadratic Hamiltonians in spaceflight mechanics
2006
A particular family of Hamiltonian functions is considered. Such functions are quadratic in the moment variables and arise in spaceflight mechanics when the averaged system of energy minimizing trajectories of the Kepler equation is computed. An important issue of perturbation theory and averaging is to provide integrable approximations of nonlinear systems. It turns out that such integrability properties hold here.
Geodesic flow of the averaged controlled Kepler equation
2008
A normal form of the Riemannian metric arising when averaging the coplanar controlled Kepler equation is given. This metric is parameterized by two scalar invariants which encode its main properties. The restriction of the metric to $\SS^2$ is shown to be conformal to the flat metric on an oblate ellipsoid of revolution, and the associated conjugate locus is observed to be a deformation of the standard astroid. Though not complete because of a singularity in the space of ellipses, the metric has convexity properties that are expressed in terms of the aforementioned invariants, and related to surjectivity of the exponential mapping. Optimality properties of geodesics of the averaged controll…