Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77801 in Books
• Published on: 1971-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 455 pages

Customer Reviews

Good Reference Source for Students, Engineers and Educators
While working for NASA/JPL back in the 1970's and 80's, I first used this book as a reference source while doing engineering support for radio astronomy experiments. I recall at the time wishing I'd know of the book a few years earlier while still at the Univ. of Arizona; while a student I would have found plenty of use for it.
Recently I have returned to academia, and find myself making use some of its material for by my lower-division astronomy students. I've come to depend on it for its clearly-written explanations of the various coordinate systems, reference frames and obital dynamics. And I especially like the way it introduces n-body problems and the how they are affected by perturbations. For myself I even make some use of it when doing calindrical calculations.
It is among a handful of reference sources that I find almost continuously useful in so many applications.

Some topics omitted, but still a good book
This book is a fairly complete overview of planetary mechanics, at least from the standpoint of the Newtonian formulation of the problem, for the authors do not use Lagrangian or Hamiltonian methods. The use of Hamiltonian formulation, via phase space constructions, sheds considerable light on the two-body and the N-body problems, but the reader interested in Hamiltonian mechanics will have to look elsewhere. Also, the authors do not discuss the presence of chaotic dynamics in orbital mechanics, nor are integrability issues discussed. In addition, the current debate over modifications of Newtonian mechanics is not included in the book, due to its time of publication.

But if one wants a practical introduction to Newtonian orbital mechanics that also addresses numerical issues, this would be a good book to begin with. I would recommend the use of a symbolic programming language, such as Mathematica or Maple, to assist in the visualization of the orbits and in the routine computations if one were to use this book as an aid to teaching orbital mechanics. Another good feature of the book is the interjection of historical background and anecdotes at various places in the book. For example, one learns that it was Edmund Halley who was primarily responsible for bringing Newton's discoveries to the world. Newton's work remained idle for twenty years until Halley encouraged Newton to publish his explanation of planetary motion.

The mechanics as outlined in this book is timeless and will continue to be learned by future generations of students as they take up the reigns of human exploration beyond the Moon to the entire solar system.

Considered a GNC handbook by Air Force space types
Ran into this one in grad school; has an excellent treatment of vector calculus in the appendix. Get this one if you are into orbital mechanics, guidance and nav. It's a short paperback type of book, easy to cart around in a briefcase. All steely-eyed missile men have this one.