According to Kepler's first law, a comet should have an
elliptic, parabolic, or hyperbolic orbit (with gravitational
attractions from the planets ignored). In suitable polar
coordinates, the position left parenthesis r comma script theta
right parenthesis of a comet satisfies an equation of the form r =
betapluse(r*cosine script theta), where beta is a constant and e
is the eccentricity of the orbit, with 0less than or equals less
than1 for an ellipse, e equals1 for a parabola, and e...