Heliospheric coordinate systems

This article gives an overview and reference to the most common coordinate systems currently used in space science. While coordinate systems used in near-Earth space physics have been described in previous work we extend that description to systems used for physical observations of the Sun and the planets and to systems based on spacecraft location. For all systems, we define the corresponding transformation in terms of Eulerian rotation matrices. We also give first order Keplerian elements for planetary orbits and determine their precision for the period 1950-2050 and describe methods to improve that precision. We also determine the Keplerian orbital elements for most major interplanetary missions and discuss their precision. We also give reference to a large set of web-sources relevant to the subject. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.