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Check Your Attitude!

… your satellite’s attitude, that is. STK provides an array of predefined attitude profiles that will suit most of your attitude modeling needs. These profiles include common orientations like nadir alignment, sun pointing, and spinning. However, at AGI we understand that our customers sometimes need the flexibility to model completely custom orientations. Enter the Attitude Simulator!

The Attitude Simulator is a plugin that enables you to define custom integrated attitude segments for a satellite. You can use this tool to generate attitude trajectories that incorporate your own torque models (e.g., gravity gradient, aerodynamics) and momentum biases, and implement customized control laws (e.g., static and dynamic feedback, dynamic compensators). You can control the initialization, simulator, and post-processing through MATLAB, VBScript, Python, or Perl script files. This provides an interface to integrate your custom attitude control directly within the STK environment.

The possibilities are endless! You can launch the Attitude Simulator from the right-click menu of a satellite object in STK’s object browser. And to get you started, we’ve provided some code examples for detumbling, tracking, and feedback control. To see a couple of these in action, check out the Attitude Simulator STK Tip on our YouTube channel.

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Systems Tool Kit (STK)

Modeling and simulation software for digital mission engineering and systems analysis.

STK Pro

The foundation for analyzing and visualizing complex systems in the context of their missions.