English

Improved Initial Guesses for Numerical Solutions of Kepler's Equation

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2024-11-26 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Computational Physics

Abstract

Numerical solutions of Kepler's Equation are critical components of celestial mechanics software, and are often computation hot spots. This work uses symbolic regression and a genetic learning algorithm to find new initial guesses for iterative Kepler solvers for both elliptical and hyperbolic orbits. The new initial guesses are simple to implement, and result in modest speed improvements for elliptical orbits, and major speed improvements for hyperbolic orbits.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.15374,
  title  = {Improved Initial Guesses for Numerical Solutions of Kepler's Equation},
  author = {Kevin J Napier},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.15374},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:09:43.846Z