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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: The Three-body Problem
From: Murray Peake
Date: 2021 Oct 27, 12:50 +0200
From: Murray Peake
Date: 2021 Oct 27, 12:50 +0200
The position of GPS satellites is a sort of restricted three-body problem (Earth, Moon, satellite, maybe sun) which needs to be solved numerically to establish the satellite ephemeris?
Cheers
Murray
On Wed, Oct 27, 2021 at 12:32 PM Robert VanderPol II <NoReply_RobertVanderPolII@fer3.com> wrote:
Bob:
I do not believe it to be navigationally significant in our lifetimes.
As I understand it the 3-body problem is how will 3 gravitational bodies interact. As I understand it, that problem can't be solved analyitically, only thru interative methods where errors slowly accumulated. The closer the bodies the harder it becomes.
As I understand it the solar system is spread out enough to ignore the effects over the short and medium term. Over the long and incredibly long term the iterative methods requires you to remeasure current location and speed to zero out the accumulating error.
Of course I could be completely wrong.
