How many Keplerian arcs are there between two points of spacetime? (Q6155753)

In this paper, the authors study the Keplerian arcs around a fixed Newtonian center $O$, joining two prescribed distinct positions $A$ and $B$, in a prescribed flight time. A ``Keplerian arc'' is a solution of the Kepler problem restricted to this time interval called the ``flight time''. For a nonflat triangle $OAB$ the ``type $k$'' of a Keplerian arc is the number of completed half-turns around the center $O$. An arc of type $k>=2$ is called ``multirevolution'', and the arc belongs to an elliptic solution of the Kepler problem. If $k=0$ or $k=1$, the arc is called ``simple arc'', and the Keplerian solution may be elliptic, parabolic, or hyperbolic. For the solution of ``Lambert's problem'' in which, given a center of attraction, an initial position and a final position, one finds an arc of Keplerian orbit joining the two positions in a given time $\tau$, the authors compute the Keplerian arcs corresponding to a given triangle $OAB$ and a positive flight time. The authors proved that, there are at most two such arcs of each ``type'', putting aside the ``opposition case'', where infinitely many planes of motion are possible. There is a bilinear quantity that they called ``$b$'' which is in all the cases a good parameter for the Keplerian arcs, joining two distinct positions. The flight time satisfies a ``variational'' differential equation in ``$b$'', which is a convex function of $b$. The authors get stronger results by introducing two new parameters for the family of arcs, the flight time $\tau$ is a convex function of each of them. The first parameter is the inverse of the angular momentum $C$, and the second parameter is $b$, and the authors find values of $C$ or $b$ which correspond to a given value of $\tau$. They observed that the number of arcs does not depend on the initial and the final positions for whatever prescribed number of completed turns. The arcs change continuously but never disappear when the prescribed flight time is increased.