In astronomy, and in particular in astrodynamics, the osculating orbit of an object in space at a given moment in time is the gravitational Kepler orbit (i.e. ellipse or other conic) that it would have about its central body if perturbations were not present. That is, the orbit that coincides with the current orbital state vectors (position and ve...
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osculating_orbit
(from the article `comet`) ...with being the semimajor axis of the cometary orbit. The original value of refers to the orbit when the comet was still outside of the solar ... The best conic section representing the path of the comet at a given instant is known as the osculating orbit. It is tangent to the true path of the ... ...pe...
Found on
http://www.britannica.com/eb/a-z/o/35
The path that a planet or other orbiting body would follow if it were subject only to the inverse-square attraction of the Sun or some other central body. In practice, secondary bodies, such as Jupiter, produce perturbations.
Found on
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/O/osculating_orbit.html
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