Journal of Applied Mathematics
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 240459, 8 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/240459
Research Article

Geodesic Effect Near an Elliptical Orbit

Alina-Daniela Vîlcu

Department of Information Technology, Mathematics and Physics, Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti, Bulevardul Bucuresti 39, Ploiesti 100680, Romania

Received 12 September 2011; Revised 23 November 2011; Accepted 14 December 2011

Academic Editor: Livija Cveticanin

Copyright © 2012 Alina-Daniela Vîlcu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Using a differential geometric treatment, we analytically derived the expression for De Sitter (geodesic) precession in the elliptical motion of the Earth through the gravitational field of the Sun with Schwarzschild's metric. The expression obtained in this paper in a simple way, using a classical approach, agrees with that given in B. M. Barker and R. F. O'Connell (1970, 1975) in a different setting, using the tools of Newtonian mechanics and the Euler-Lagrange equations.