Celestial Mechanics

The aim of this book is to demonstrate to a wider audience, as well as to a more skilled audience, the many fascinating aspects of modern celestial mechanics. It sets out to do this without the use of mathematics.

I was delighted to be invited by my colleagues Alessandra Celletti and Ettore Perozzi to provide a foreword to their book, Celestial Mechanics: The Waltz of the Planets. Having known them for many years and long admired their work in the subject so many of us love and are fascinated by, 1 read with great attention and pleasure the text when it arrived. It is a formidable task they have set themselves, to provide a book that describes attempts by successive generations of astronomers from the dawn of history five millennia ago to observe, record and understand the phenomena of the heavens, particularly the intricate and perplexing behaviour of the planets. Sun and Moon. As naked eye astronomy became aided by the telescope and the photographic plate, and since the middle of the twentieth century, by instruments launched on spacecraft into circum- Earth orbit or to the Moon and planets and beyond, the discovery of new satellites, scores of them, and ring systems displaying new and initially perplexing behaviour also demanded explanations for that behaviour. It is also the inspiring story of science itself with special reference to how lonely individuals, impelled by curiosity and dedicated to seeking the truth, and nothing but the truth, about the fascinating phenomena of nature, ultimately became accepted as scientists, those players in the most successful endeavour ever engaged in by the human race.

Reinforces public awareness as a key issue for appreciating and exploiting the wealth of astronomical data and images gathered during the space age Explains celestial mechanics without the use of mathematics Authors provide an interdisciplinary cross section of all celestial mechanics

Autorentext

Alessandra Celletti received her PhD in 1989 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) under the supervision of Professors Jurgen Moser and Jorge Waldvogel. She is a full professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and since 2020, she has been a member of the governing board and the Vice President of ANVUR. Her research interests include Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Systems with reference to perturbative methods and applications to Solar system dynamics. She is a founding member of the Italian Society of Celestial Mechanics and Astrodynamics that chaired from 2001 to 2013. Since 2010, she has been an honorary member of the "Celestial Mechanics Institute". In 2018, she became the President of the Scientific Committee in Celestial Mechanics of the IAU and in 2019–2020, she was in the Governing Board of the Italian Space Agency. In 2023, she was awarded the "Dirk Brouwer Career Award" from the American Astronomical Society. In addition, the asteroid 117539 bears her name.

Inhalt
Around and around.- Three bodies and no solution.- Celestial waltz.- Cosmic spinning tops.- Our chaotic Solar System.- Singularities, collisions and threatening bodies.- Of Moon and man.- Rock around the planets.- Lords of the rings.- At the edge of the Solar System.- On the road to exolife.