Orbital Mechanics for Engineering Students

by Howard Curtis

Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
ISBN: 0080977472

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Book Description

Written by Howard Curtis, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Embry-Riddle University, Orbital Mechanics for Engineering Students is a crucial text for students of aerospace engineering. Now in its 3e, the book has been brought up-to-date with new topics, key terms, homework exercises, and fully worked examples. Highly illustrated and fully supported with downloadable MATLAB algorithms for project and practical work, this book provides all the tools needed to fully understand the subject.

• New chapter on orbital perturbations
• New and revised examples and homework problems
• Increased coverage of attitude dynamics, including new MATLAB algorithms and examples

Customer Reviews

This is really a good book, like a brand new one. The seller is one of the best I have ever met. They upgraded the delivery service, because it is near the beginning of the semester.

Curtis deserves credit for managing to make the material described easy enough to swallow that you can basically jump into this material even cold turkey. The dialogue and derviations are easily followable, and theres enough of an intro on kinematics and a review of some of the basic geometry and algebra that you wont require a second textbook to translate the first.

The problems arrise in the examples. While I appluad the majority of them, its readily apparent that they were performed by a assistant or a student, as theres just enough errors to radically confuse aynone trying to copy the problem to get an understanding of the process. And while the examples are plentuiful enough to be incredibly useful, they cover only the barest bones. I can understand not wanting to spend 1/3 of the book performing example problems, a few of the more complex subjects would've been greatly assistaed by just a handful of problems that involved more than just perfect universes with circular, coplanar orbits using point masses. And even the homework problems are no respite, as some of the chapters had a grand total of 8 problems, meaning at most 4 had in-book defined answers for personal study.

Overall, for such a dry and complex subject matter, this book is extremely useful, but just 20-30 more pages of problems and exmaples would've been a termendous boon.