M.Fränz
Astronomy Unit, Queen Mary, University of London, London, E1 4NS 1
D. Harper
The Sanger Centre, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambs CB10 1SA
This article gives an overview and reference
to the most common coordinate systems currently used in
space science. While coordinate systems used in near-Earth space
physics have been described in previous work we
extend that description to systems used for physical
observations of the Sun and the planets and to systems based
on spacecraft location. For all systems we define the
corresponding transformation in terms of Eulerian rotation matrices.
We also give first order Keplerian elements for planetary orbits
and determine their precision for the period 1950-2050 and
describe methods to improve that precision. We also
determine the Keplerian orbital elements for most
major interplanetary missions and discuss their precision.
We also give reference to a large set of
web-sources relevant to the subject.
Discipline: b. Celestial Mechanics.
