Dynamic discretization method for solving Kepler’s equation

Abstract

Kepler’s equation needs to be solved many times for a variety of problems in Celestial Mechanics. Therefore, computing the solution to Kepler’s equation in an efficient manner is of great importance to that community. There are some historical and many modern methods that address this problem. Of the methods known to the authors, Fukushima’s discretization technique performs the best. By taking more of a system approach and combining the use of discretization with the standard computer science technique known as dynamic programming, we were able to achieve even better performance than Fukushima. We begin by defining Kepler’s equation for the elliptical case and describe existing solution methods. We then present our dynamic discretization method and show the results of a comparative analysis. This analysis will demonstrate that, for the conditions of our tests, dynamic discretization performs the best.