Perturbation theory and canonical coordinates in celestial mechanics

Abstract

KAM theory owes most of its success to its initial motivation: the application to problems of celestial mechanics. The masterly application was offered by Arnold in the 60s who worked out a theorem, that he named the “Fundamental Theorem” (FT), especially designed for the planetary problem. However, FT could be really used at that purpose only when, about 50 years later, a set of coordinates constructively taking the invariance by rotation and close-to-integrability into account was used. Since then, some progress has been done in the symplectic assessment of the problem, and here we review such results.