Chaos Regained: On the Possibility of a New Era of Orbital Dynamics

In this paper I explore how the nature, scope, and limits of the knowledge obtained in orbital dynamics—the science concerned with the motions of bodies in the solar system—has changed in recent years. Innovations in the design of spacecraft trajectories, as well as in astronomy, have led to a new hybrid of theory and experiment, and suggest that the kind of knowledge achieved in orbital dynamics today is dramatically different from the knowledge achieved prior to those innovations. Thus, orbital dynamics may have entered a new era