Celestial Mechanics

Cover -- Table of contents -- Foreword -- Authors' preface -- Acknowledgements -- List of illustrations -- CH 1 Around and around -- The importance of being Lucretius -- Eccentric Kepler -- Tyge the astrologer -- Giants' shoulders -- Perturbations -- Drawing orbits -- Neptune's karma -- Planets on a diet -- Gone with the tides -- CH 2 Three Bodies and no solution -- Celestial mechanics gets the blues -- Lagrange in equilibrium -- Periodic orbits -- Mapping chaos -- KAM and all that -- Inside the rings of Saturn -- A flash in the night -- CH 3 Celestial Waltz -- Heavenly resonances -- Commensurable motions -- Greeks and Trojans -- Famous affairs -- The chance of chaos -- Colombo's egg -- 4 Cosmic Spinning Tops -- Spin and orbit -- The dark side of the Moon -- Tidal friction -- Geostationary satellites -- A portrait of Mercury -- Tidy chaos -- The obliquity of the planets -- Raiders of the lost equinoxes -- Is the land of Atlantis really lost? -- Astronology -- CH 5 Our chaotic system -- The ubiquity of chaos -- Propagating orbits -- Planets in numbers -- The stability of the Solar System -- Close encounters -- Raining comets -- The long journey of meteorites -- Jurassic asteroids -- CH 6 Singularities, collisions and threathening bodies -- From zero to infinity -- Collisions in the Solar System -- Astroblames -- Near-Earth asteroids -- Impact probability -- Don't panic! -- Mitigation -- CH 7 Of moon and man -- The cycles of Selene -- Acts of the Gods -- Eclipsed by the Saros -- Lunar theories -- Holidays in Elatina -- Moonshadows -- Highways to the Moon -- CH 8 Rock around the planets -- Space in flight -- Orbiting the Earth -- Space debris -- The accessibility of celestial bodies -- Going deep space -- Highways to the planets -- Last but not least -- CH 9 Lords of the rings -- Ringed worlds -- Forbidden regions -- Jovian halos -- Sightseeing Saturn -- Elliptic rings -- Arcs in the sky -- Once upon a ring -- CH 10 At the edge of the solar system -- Beyond Pluto -- Smiley and the others -- Big Brothers are watching us -- Chiron and the Centaurs -- Planet X -- CH 11 On the road to exolife -- Beyond the Solar System -- Hunting for exoplanets -- A Galactic zoo -- Astrobiology -- Back to the future -- Appendix 1 Planetary data -- Appendix 2 Planetary satellite data -- Appendix 3 Space missions -- Appendix 4 internet resources -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index -- Last Page.