Remarks on quadratic hamiltonians in spaceflight mechanics

Abstract

A particular family of Hamiltonian functions is considered. Such functions are quadratic in the moment variables and arise in spaceflight mechanics when the averaged system of energy minimizing trajectories of the Kepler equation is computed. An important issue of perturbation theory and averaging is to provide integrable approximations of nonlinear systems. It turns out that such integrability properties hold here. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.