How to perturb orbital elements in pyephem?

Question

Does anyone know if pyephem provides a function to compute the "perturbed" orbital element values for a given date/time, given a set of input orbital element values and an associated epoch? I am currently using the sla_pertel function from the pyslalib package to perturb the orbital elements and that works fine, but I would prefer not to have to use that package if there is already something in pyephem that I could use to do the same thing. I looked through the pyephem documentation, but didn't see anything obvious to do that. Thanks.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, no; PyEphem includes neither a pertubation module, nor gravitational simulation more generally, nor indeed any sort of dynamical model — all of the math currently built in to the package is analytic and predicts positions using orbital elements or polynomials that have had any pertubation built into them by somebody else.