Physics 21 reading list for the week of 1/17/2005

This week marks the beginning of a two-part assignment whereby we shall be studying the trajectory of spacecraft Voyager 2. In the first part of the assignment, we improve our Runge-Kutta ODE integrator by including the adaptive control of the stepsize to achieve the accuracy required for our study, and we consider the technique of gravitational assists. Please study these readings carefully, as they are very important to complete the assignment correctly.

- First visit Voyager's website for some background on the mission.

- Go on to Numerical Recipes' Ch. 16.2 on adaptive stepsize control for Runge-Kutta. We will employ the simpler control strategy (step doubling), but you should still read page 716 about embedded Runge-Kutta formulas, and you should read carefully the following pages (up to page 718) about the strategies to control the stepsize.

- If necessary, go back to review Ch. 16.0 and Ch. 16.1 on the numerical integration of differential equations.

- Last, read J. A. Van Allen's Gravitational assist in celestial mechanics -- a tutorial [American Journal of Physics 71, 448 (2003)].