Kepler orbit led to Johannes Kepler working on his celestial mechanics. He later became known as the father of calculus. In 1601, Johannes Kepler acquired the extensive, meticulous observations of the planets made by Tycho Brahe. Kepler would spend the next five years trying to fit the observations of the planet Mars to various curves. In 1609, Kepler published the first two of his three laws of planetary motion. The first law states: More generally, the path of an object undergoing Keplerian motion may also follow a parabola or a hyperbola, which, along with ellipses, belong to a group of curves known
Phil Nicholson Phil Nicholson Philip D. Nicholson (born 1951) is an Australian-born professor of astronomy at Cornell University in the Astronomy department specialising in Planetary Sciences. He has been editor-in-chief of the journal "Icarus" since 1998. Nicholson received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1979. Nicholson's research centers on two main areas: orbital dynamics in planetary ring systems and infrared observational studies of planets, their satellites, and their rings. His work has included studies of the ring systems of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune via Voyager observations and ground-based stellar occultations; Earth-based observations with the 5-meter Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory of several small