Hi Jonathan,
That is a pretty good book, simple and easy to understand. One of the
problems with it is that it uses canonical units where the constants are 1,
so you loose track of where the constants go to use more conventional units
(kilometers, miles, AU, days, seconds, furlongs, fortnights, etc...), but it
does a good job of simplifying if you just want to learn how things work.
It also provides a very interesting view of orbital elements and their
calculation, treating the eccentricity, for example, as a vector whose
magnitude is what we're used to being called the eccentricity and direction
points towards perihelion. It's a novel approach that I've not seen
elsewhere. It's also good for it's application to spaceflight for those
interested in sending your spacecraft where you want and you can't beat the
price! Coming from a Celestial Mechanics background, I personally prefer
Danby, Roy and the new book by Murray and Dermott ("Solar System Dynamics")
since they go into problems that are more useful for my interests.
Jim.
On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Jonathan T Wojack wrote:
>
> I received the book "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics" yesterday in the mail
> from Amazon.com for $10 U.S. It seems to be a great book. Written in
> .
> .
> .
> ------------------------------
> Jonathan T. Wojack tlj18@juno.com
> 39.706d N 75.683d W http://www.geocities.com/tlj18_99/
Jim Scotti
Lunar & Planetary Laboratory jscotti@pirl.lpl.arizona.edu
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721 USA http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/
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