The proximities of asteroids and critical points of the distance function

Abstract

The proximities are important for different purposes, for example to evaluate the risk of collisions of asteroids or comets with the Solar-System planets. We describe a simple and efficient method for finding the asteroid proximities in the case of elliptical orbits with a common focus. In several examples we have compared our method with the recent excellent algebraic and polynomial solutions of Gronchi (2002, 2005).

Keywords

• Celestial mechanics
• Minor planets
• asteroids