Monday, August 30, 2021

Another win for Lambert

End of last winter I was looking into Lambert problems - in orbital dynamics. It seems the old Switzerman isn't done with us yet: apparently he is also known (by astronomers) for asking about albedo. The Bernese in particular are on a roll lately.

Kevin Heng has, I gather, solved a class of phase-curve problems. Where we used to have to plug in some data into a computer and wait it out, now (for these types) we can just solve 'em. Consider Kepler as a solution for a class of Newtonian problems, the Two-Body class - a solution needing a question, which Newton found. Heng has turned that around for Lambert. So I guess he's more like Lagrange here.

So far the method is applied to Kepler-7b and to, er, Sol-5.

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