Digital Mission Engineering Products: 2022 R2

As the commercial space segment continues to grow and the deployment of so-called "mega-constellations" looms, the need for modeling and simulation of space assets is more urgent than ever. STK’s large constellation modeling capabilities are growing to meet these needs.  With STK 12.5, you can model these large constellation designs with more flexibility, and you can include the Satellite Collection object within chained calculations, to better analyze and understand complex routing options for connecting ground-based assets. You can use STK’s Chain object to create an order-of-operations workflow across multiple assets so that you can analyze end-to-end links across collections of dynamic objects.
 

As cloud-first infrastructures and virtual environments become more common, software developers often need to produce containerized applications because they can be deployed in the same basic way on-premises or in the cloud. To support this trend, STK 12.5 includes new documentation and code samples that explain and demonstrate headless execution of STK Engine on Linux applications within containers.

Designing and analyzing communications systems is complicated by the increasing congestion of the RF spectrum, making simulation of these systems and the RF environment essential. With STK 12.5, you can analyze the effects of a crowded RF environment on an individual receiver, making it quicker and easier to characterize interference and develop mitigation strategies. This new capability perfectly augments STK’s Comm System object, which is used to analyze groups of objects. With this pairing, you can now choose which workflow is best suited to your specific analysis task.      

Space weather phenomena can have profound impacts on the performance of communications and radar systems. To model and predict one such effect, STK 12.5 introduces an enhancement that enables you to account for solar activity in atmospheric absorption by specifying a solar flux index.  In addition, when using the VOACAP model for over-the-horizon HF propagation, this release of STK enables you to report on multiple dopplers from skywave propagation paths that include a ground bounce. Analyzing multiple dopplers improves your understanding of the characteristics of objects in motion.
 

With STK 12.5, you can model ground vehicles and ships in the EOIR capability and generate sensor-to-target metrics that incorporate these objects.
 

STK 12.5 improves the modeling capability for EOIR sensor simulations by providing enhanced central body property maps. These property maps account for overlapping texture maps and enable you to model temperature, emissivity, and reflectance at higher fidelity.
 

Modeling interplanetary missions is a strength of STK’s Astrogator capability; one that is further enhanced in STK 12.5 with support for a higher fidelity atmospheric model for Venus: NASA’s VenusGRAM model (https://software.nasa.gov/software/MFS-32314-1). This model provides high fidelity engineering estimates for temperature, density, pressure, and winds for the Venus atmosphere. You can include the effects of this atmosphere model on your spacecraft’s trajectory when its mission may be influenced by the planet. 

STK 12.5 enhances the interoperability of STK's Aviator capability with Ansys Fluent. You can now use aerodynamics parameters that have been imported from Fluent in aircraft models that use Aviator's Advanced Fixed Wing Tool and its missile catalog. This enables Aviator to use high-fidelity aerodynamic models generated in Fluent with the advanced modelling capabilities of advanced fixed wing and missile performance models.
 

Test and evaluation engineers are responsible for analyzing and understanding large, aggregated data sets and system performance metrics that often come from several different systems simultaneously. STK’s Test and Evaluation Tool Kit (TETK) offers unique ways of ingesting, analyzing, and visualizing these data sets to help you easily identify and understandsystem performance across discrete test conditions.With this latest release, TETK can read SVG files, which you can use to create visualization tools such as gauges, dials, bars, and other ways to plot on-screen data. With the right visualization, you can easily disseminate important data and quickly understand system-level performance against targeted metrics and test requirements.

ODTK 7.5 enhances the simulation and processing of live navigation data for missions in the inner solar system with the addition of a higher fidelity atmospheric model for Venus. By implementing NASA’s VenusGRAM model (https://software.nasa.gov/software/MFS-32314-1) —which provides high-fidelity engineering estimates for temperature, density, pressure, and winds of the Venusian atmosphere —you can include the effects of this atmosphere model on your spacecraft’s trajectory when its mission may be influenced by the planet.

ODTK 7.5 provides an introductory capability to estimate the trajectory of moving vehicles in a non-orbital environment on or near the surface of Earth (or another planetary body). The motion of the vehicles is modeled through the use stochastic processes, which can be configured to accommodate the type of motion that a target vehicle may exhibit. Examples of such vehicles include cars or ships on the surface of Earth and rovers on the surface of other planetary bodies. You can use all the measurement types available for tracking spacecraft to track surface vehicles, which includes the possibility of passive and cooperative tracking.

Many deep space missions use JPL’s SPICE data exchange format for sharing information. ODTK has supported SPICE formatted ephemeris (.bsp) for specification of central body and spacecraft ephemeris for a long time, and now we’ve added native support of SPICE formatted attitude files for the specification of spacecraft attitude. This support removes a step from the conops for deep space missions, which used to require you to convert SPICE based attitude (.ck) to the (.a) format before ingestion into ODTK.

Missions to small bodies such as asteroids are challenged by the fact that we usually don’t have precise estimates of the trajectory or mass of the target body. ODTK 7.4 introduced the ability to estimate corrections to the ephemeris of a central body, and with ODTK 7.5 you can also estimate its gravitational parameter. The combination of these capabilities enablesyou to perform more accurate simulations and operations for missions to small bodies.