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Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion were a stunning development in human intellectual history. This second edition is a concise, self-contained treatment of Kepler/Newton planetary orbits at the level of an advanced undergraduate physics student. New to this edition are elements such as a detailed derivation of Newton’s shell-point equivalency theorem, a revised derivation of the polar equation for an ellipse, Kepler’s Third Law for non-inverse-square central potentials, a chapter on transfer and rendezvous orbits, and an expanded treatment of methods of calculating the average distance between the Sun and a planet. The approach is student-friendly, featuring brief sections, clear notation and diagrams, and mathematics that undergraduates will be comfortable with, accompanied by numerous exercises.
Key Features
- Provides a compact, self-contained treatment of a universally interesting topic
- Contains brief sections, with emphasis put on clear first-principles discussions of the interpretations of calculations and expressions
- Student-friendly, with numerous worked examples, clear notation, and exercises
- Sets a solid foundation for more advanced studies of phenomena such as orbital perturbations, precession, and unbound orbits
Bruce Cameron Reed is the Charles A Dana Professor of Physics Emeritus at Alma College, Michigan, with a 35-year career of undergraduate-level teaching in Canada and the United States. He has published around 140 regular journal papers, 60 semi-popular articles, review papers, and book reviews, plus eight texts on the Manhattan Project, quantum mechanics, and Keplerian orbits. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has served as Editor of American Physical Society’s “Physics & Society” newsletter for four years (2009-13), and is currently an Associate Editor with American Journal of Physics.
1 Polar coordinates - a review
2 Dynamical quantities in polar coordinates
3 Central Forces
4 The Ellipse
5 Elliptical orbits and the inverse-square law: Geometry meets physics
6 Kepler’s equation: anomalies true, eccentric, and mean
7 Transfer and rendezvous orbits
8 Some sundry results
A Spherical coordinates
B Circular-orbit perturbation theory for non-inverse-square central forces
C Further reading
D Summary of useful formulae
E Glossary of symbols