Introduction

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 fairly comprehensive, review of this subject area is provided in Appendix A.

Celestial mechanics is the branch of astronomy that is concerned with the motions of celestial objects--in particular, the objects that make up the Solar System. The main aim of celestial mechanics is to reconcile these motions with the predictions of Newtonian mechanics. Modern analytic celestial mechanics started in 1687 with the publication of the Principia by Isaac Newton (1643-1727), and was subsequently developed into a mature science by celebrated scientists such as Euler (1707-1783), Clairaut (1713-1765), D'Alembert (1717-1783), Lagrange (1736-1813), Laplace (1749-1827), and Gauss (1777-1855). This book is largely devoted to the study of the ``classical'' problems of celestial mechanics that were investigated by these scientists. These problems include the figure of the Earth, the tidal interaction between the Earth and the Moon, the free and forced precession and nutation of the Earth, the three-body problem, the orbit of the Moon, and the effect of interplanetary gravitational interactions on planetary orbits. This book does not discuss positional astronomy: i.e., the branch of astronomy that is concerned with finding the positions of celestial objects in the Earth's sky at a particular instance in time. Nor does this book discuss the relatively modern (but extremely complicated) developments in celestial mechanics engendered by the advent of cheap fast computers, as well as data from unmanned space probes: e.g., the resonant interaction of planetary moons, chaotic motion, the dynamics of planetary rings. Interested readers are directed to the book by Murray & Dermott.

The major sources for the material appearing in this book are as follows:

An Elementary Treatise on the Lunar Theory, H. Godfray (Macmillan, London UK, 1853).

An Introductory Treatise on the Lunar Theory, E.W. Brown (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1896).

Lectures on the Lunar Theory, J.C. Adams (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1900).

An Introduction to Celestial Mechanics, F.R. Moulton, 2nd Revised Edition (Macmillan, New York NY, 1914).

Dynamics, H. Lamb, 2nd Edition (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1923).

Celestial Mechanics, W.M. Smart (Longmans, London UK, 1953).

An Introductory Treatise on Dynamical Astronomy, H.C. Plummer (Dover, New York NY, 1960).

Methods of Celestial Mechanics, D. Brouwer, and G.M. Clemence (Academic Press, New York NY, 1961).

Celestial Mechanics: Volume II, Part 1: Perturbation Theory, Y. Hagihara (MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1971).

Analytical Mechanics, G.R. Fowles (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York NY, 1977).

Orbital Motion, A.E. Roy (Wiley, New York NY, 1978).

Solar System Dynamics, C.D. Murray, and S.F. Dermott (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1999).

Classical Mechanics, 3rd Edition, H. Goldstein, C. Poole, and J. Safko (Addison-Wesley, San Fransisco CA, 2002).

Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems, 5th Edition, S.T. Thornton, and J.B. Marion (Brooks/Cole--Thomson Learning, Belmont CA, 2004).

Analytical Mechanics, 7th Edition, G.R. Fowles, and G.L. Cassiday (Brooks/Cole--Thomson Learning, Belmont CA, 2005).

Astronomical Algorithms, J. Meeus, 2nd Edition (Willmann-Bell, Richmond VA, 2005).