Preface

Summary

What is a Man,

If his chief good and market of his time

Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not

That capability and god-like reason

To fust in us unused.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, IV, iv

We are living in a new age of discovery. The major voyages of exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have modern parallels in the interplanetary spacecraft missions that have “discovered” our solar system. The data from these spacecraft combined with ground-based observations have revealed a solar system that is more than a collection of planets, satellites, asteroids, comets, and dust distributed in some arbitrary fashion: It has an intricate dynamical structure, which can be largely understood by the application of a simple inverse square law of force to its constituent bodies. To understand the dynamical structure and evolution of the solar system we must therefore understand the qualitative and quantitative effects of the universal law of gravitation.

We consider solar system dynamics to be the application of the techniques of celestial mechanics to solve real problems in planetary science. There are several classical texts on celestial mechanics and many are still in use today. These include the books by Plummer (1918), Brown & Shook (1933), Brouwer & Clemence, (1961) and, more recently Danby (1988). The books by Hagihara (1970, 1972a,b, 1974a,b, 1975a,b, 1976a,b) are authoritative works of reference but make little attempt to convey understanding.