Numerical analysis of the symmetric methods

Aimed at the initial value problem of the particular second-order ordinary differential equations,y=f(x, y), the symmetric methods (Quinlan and Tremaine, 1990) and our methods (Xu and Zhang, 1994) have been compared in detail by integrating the artificial earth satellite orbits in this paper. In the end, we point out clearly that the integral accuracy of numerical integration of the satellite orbits by applying our methods is obviously higher than that by applying the same order formula of the symmetric methods when the integration time-interval is not greater than 12000 periods.