I was invited speaker in the 7th International Meeting on Celestial Mechanics. The meeting took place in San Martino al Cimino, a beautiful village situated near the city of Viterbo, Italy. I would like to thank the organizers for the kind invitation, and the organization of the meeting. My presentation took place in the Monday afternoon session, where I summarized my recent scientific findings on Cassini state 1. It has also been made available on youtube thanks to the organizers.
Cassini states correspond to special orientations of the spin axis of a celestial body. If the orbit of a celestial body gets perturbed then the orientation of the rotational axis of the body tries to keep its alignment with the normal axis of the orbital plane. The steady state solution corresponds to the point in the figure. The closed curves surrounding this point correspond to solutions of the problem where the rotational axis starts oscillating around the steady state solution.
The figure was created using Wolfram Mathematica and was first published in my article of CM&DA. See also my related work (I, II) as a co-author done with Marco Sansottera and Anne Lemaitre, and Benoit Noyelles (III).
Christoph Lhotka 