Symbolic and Parallel Computation in Celestial Mechanics

Abstract

One aspect of celestial mechanics is the computation of the long-term orbits of celestial bodies. This type of computation is complicated by the interaction of the many bodies that need to be considered to derive accurate long-term behavior. For reasons explained in this chapter, it is necessary to do this symbolically rather than numerically. Symbolic computations performed on a Lisp machine are described. The visualization of the solution is accomplished in a massively parallel SIMD machine.