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Modern Celestial Mechanics deals with the motion of celestial bodies, such as planets, asteroids and comets, as well as with the trajectories of artificial satellites aimed to fulfil commercial or scientific goals.

Starting from the late XX.th century, the widespread diffusion of fast computers, the advances in microelectronics applied to astronomical observations and the routine access to near-Earth and interplanetary space has greatly contributed to widen the horizons of Celestial Mechanics. As soon as it was possible to extend consistently the time span of numerical integrations, chaos became the subject of experiment; more recently, the confirmation by observation of the existence of the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt called for a major reassessment of the outer solar system dynamical evolution. At the same time space flight dynamics grew as a self-standing field of study, mapping the space ways for man-made celestial objects to travel. This in turn allowed observations from short range of planetary systems, and resulted in further discoveries of peculiar orbital configurations among celestial bodies.

Thus modern Celestial Mechanics has a basic interdisciplinary nature. Its methods and applications are developed by mathematicians, physicists and engineers working in widely different contexts: universities, research institutions, astronomical observatories, space agencies and aerospace industry. Yet different communities often speak different "languages" and are subjected to different constraints, eventually giving rise to frequent communication problems.

From this cultural context comes the idea of organizing on a regular basis a meeting on Celestial Mechanics whose aim is to establish a common ground among people working in this field and belonging to different communities. The First Italian Meeting on Celestial Mechanics, hosted by the Department of Mathematics of the University of L'Aquila in the spring 1993, represented an early attempt to this end, mainly on a national level. The success of this experience allowed to organize, four years later, a second meeting which achieved full international acknowledgment with the participation of representatives from many countries and the publication of the proceedings as a special issue of the scientific journal Planetary and Space Science.

CELMEC III is the natural follow-up of these activities: it is intended to out stand as an international meeting on Celestial Mechanics where the latest discoveries and developments carried out in the various fields of study where this discipline plays an important role are discussed. Many exciting news have come across both the astronomical and the space science community within the very last years. The Trans-Neptunian population is now better know and the almost 300 objects discovered so far exhibit a rather peculiar dynamical structure. The ever increasing number of extrasolar planets observed has profound implications on the existence of life in the universe, and as a consequence space missions have been planned to improve their detection (e.g. the Gaia and Eddington projects of the European Space Agency). The study of the dynamical evolution of the Near-Earth Asteroids still plays an important role in protecting our planet from cosmic impacts, while scientific missions now confidently rely on complex orbital configurations, such as the so-called "halo orbits" around the lagrangian poit L2 of the Earth-Sun system where the NASA New Generation Space Telescope will be placed. Interplanetary missions always represent a major challenge for space flight dynamics: within this framework, reaching, orbiting and landing on Mars appears in the long-term strategic plans of all major space agencies. Technology is also addressed, especially as far as low-thrust electric propulsion is concerned, being an essential tool for achieving scientific goals such as the detailed multi-spacecraft exploration of planet Mercury foreseen by the ESA BepiColombo cornerstone level mission.

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