Hi Guys! So I know it’s been awhile since you’ve heard from me, but things have been busy here at AGI. Anyway I’m back with a quick blog that has nothing to do with launch vehicles or missiles. I know, it makes me just as sad as it makes you, but we’ve got a really cool new competition starting up and I think it’s a great thing, so I wanted to talk about it a bit.

So this new competition is the University Grant Competition. It’s for college students (sorry all you aerospace professionals, I know you were excited to get in on the action), but it’s time for university students give it the ol’ college try! (Do you love how awful that was as much as I do). Ok so the competition is for college students around the world to do some creative problem solving with AGI software. What do you need to do in this competition? Well we are asking you to come up with your own problem and then create the solution either using AGI desktop products or AGI Components (for all you programmers out there).  It can be related to aircraft, spacecraft, missiles, whatever you want, you have the freedom to create your own problem and solve it!

So why would you want to do this? Well besides having fun using STK, all the STK experience will look good on your resume, and the winner in each category (there are 5 different you can enter) will get a $1,000 grant and an invitation to speak at the 2010 Roadshow (which also looks excellent on a resume). So head on over to the competition website and get all the details to get you started.  And if you have any questions feel free to ask!

Till Next Time,

Rocket Girl (aka Amanda)

I don’t know if you guys have realized this, but AGI is a pretty cool place to work, especially for an engineer. We were recently named a Top Small Workplace of 2009 by The Wall Street Journal and Winning Workplaces. Not only do we get to work with awesome software (and I’m not just saying that because I work here. Seriously STK is a wonderful software package that lets me do missile intercept analyses by day and design trajectories to the Moon by night. What other software can do that?), but we get to work with great people in a relaxed but exciting environment. No two days are ever the same around here and not many places can say that. I know this may sound like a bad infomercial but it’s true, if you spent just a day here, you’d realize that this place is a breeding ground for creative and innovative work that challenges you all the time. Now the Wall Street Journal talks about the great perks. And believe me, the free breakfast, lunch and dinner, the on-site laundry facility, the gym and other things like on-site oil change are fantastic. But what brings me back every day is the work I do and the people I work with. Like right now, I’m blogging about how great the company is (or dabbling in social media) but when I’m finished with this, I’m going to be working on a missile defense-related scenario and testing out our new version of Missile Modeling Tools. As an aerospace engineer who has a secret love of social media (have I mentioned you can find me on Twitter?), I can’t think of a better way to spend my day. So I figure you may not want to hear just what I and The Wall Street Journal have to say, so I went around the office and found some engineers to talk about why they think this is a great place to work. You’ll hear from Dan Honaker an applications support engineer, Arianne Liepa our training manager, and Frank Snyder a product evangelist (where else can engineer get that awesome title?!) who actually works for us down in Huntsville, AL, but happens to be in town this week, and of course yours truly.

To learn more about AGI’s work environment visit: http://www.agi.com/corporate/employment/. While you are there you’ll notice a link on the bottom left called The Pink Bathrobe Video, if you have a minute or two it’s well worth the watch!
 
Till Next Time,

Rocket Girl (aka Amanda)

Alright guys, the moment you’ve all been waiting for is now here! For those of you who are current customers you’ll be receiving your STK 9 disks in the mail. If you can’t wait for the disks to get there, you can visit the AGI Developer Network download section to download the install as well as STK 9 Engine, Planetary Data, Scheduler … you get the idea. If you are not a current customer but want to try STK 9, you can download it as well, and then get a demo license for the software. Once you’re demo license expires you’ll be left with STK Basic, which is free, and still very cool. For more information on the different versions of STK, click here. For those of you who are using my very favorite module, STK/Missile Modeling Tools (MMT), you will need to keep STK 8.1.3 in order to continue to use MMT. There is an STK 9 compatible version that will be released in the next few months that will have phenomenal updates especially to IFT and MDT (trust me on this; I’ve been playing around with it already). You can still install and use STK 9; you’ll just need to make sure you are running STK 8.1.3 when you run it. Those that are members of our Educational Alliance Program will unfortunately have to wait until the end of June/beginning of July. You will get your license when you renew for next year.

So now you know the release logistics, but what about resources? If you visit www.agi.com/whatsnew you can watch short videos on different updates and new functionality in this release. I highly recommend you watch the Interactive Reports video under the Improved Functionality section. That’s right, it’s narrated by me and involves a very cool missile defense scenario (an RV with an RCS  – access analysis, SNR analysis).  Also make sure you register for today’s “Enhancements In STK 9 Webinar,” hosted by AGI Product Manager Ronnie Allan. If you are reading this after May 26, 2009, you missed the live event, but you can still download and watch the webinar at www.agi.com/webinars.

Well that’s it for this time, go get STK 9 and your licenses and start playing with it right now!

Till Next Time,

Rocket Girl (aka Amanda)

I’m still exploring the pre-release version STK 9 (it’s going to be released very soon, I promise!) and came across a cool little wizard that I hadn’t noticed before. What is this STK 9 feature that I was so excited about I had to share it right away?! Well it’s the new way you can insert an area target into your scenario. I know this sounds a little silly to be excited about, but I was creating a scenario in STK 9 today and had to add an area target and was genuinely surprised and pleased with how great this is. When you go to insert an area target into STK 9, just go to the new Insert STK Objects panel:

You’ll see a couple of different methods for entering a new area target. The first one is Select Countries and US States. So if you select that, the following panel comes up:

You can see on the left-hand side of the panel the countries and the US states are listed. You can refine your search by turning one or the other off, e.g. if you are looking for England, you can turn off the US States, since you don’t need them. You can also jump to a particular spot in the list (it’s alphabetized) by typing a full or partial country or state name, but your cursor needs to be over the list to do this. Another cool feature is multi-select; if you want all the US states you can select them all at once (hold down Ctrl and click the states) and even better yet, if you turn on the Customize option you can set the color instead of going back later and opening up the properties and setting the color for all of them there, it’s done for you right in this panel!

While this is very cool, this is not my favorite part of adding a new area target. That is the Area Target Wizard. I was floored by this. You can build your area target out from this simple panel, it’s so unbelievably easy. Here is what it looks like:

How wonderfully glorious is this panel?! Look at this. You can do it all from here when it comes to your area target. So let’s start at the top and work our way down. So at the top left you name your area target, and then select your Area Type, which can be a pattern or an ellipse. A pattern is when you specify the position points of the area targets parameter and an ellipse is where you define an elliptical area boundary with the semimajor axis, the semiminor axis, bearing and centroid.

Below that you have Graphics, so if it matters what colors are used for the other STK objects when selecting an area target color, you can select Show All STK Objects and they will be displayed on the 2D map in the Area Target Wizard. Then you can select the color you would like your area target.

Next, you have two different modes for actually defining your area target. The first one is using the Map Pick Mode. With this option you can simply click out the area target you want on the 2D Map, and the latitude and longitude points that you click out will be displayed. Now if you want to move some of the points, toggle on the Select Points option, go down to the 2D Map and click on the point you want to move. Then toggle on the Move Selection option and drag the point to a new location. Below is a simple area target I’ve clicked out in the United States:

Now I’ve decided that I want to move the second point that I entered. So I turn on Select Point, select the point and drag it to the new spot. You’ll notice that in the list of Lat and Long, the point that I’m moving to is highlighted.

How awesome is that?! I absolutely love this new Area Target Wizard and think you all should give it a try when STK 9 comes out (soon, I promise). Another note about adding area targets; you also have the option to import a shapefile, so if you have to interoperate with another tool that uses shapefiles, you can pulls those directly into STK as well. And remember if you like the old way of inserting an Area Target, you still can. Alright gang it’s time for me to go spread the word about the Area Target Wizard.

Till Next Time,

Rocket Girl (aka Amanda)

As you all know by now, North Korea launched a rocket on 5 Apr 2009 around 02:30:00.00 UTC. AGI worked prior to the launch to create videos and VDFs that demonstrate how our software can be applied to analyze events like this. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the videos, visit www.agi.com/northkorea to download and view them. We’ve also put together a 15-minute video that walks through the rationale of how we actually built out the scenario behind the videos. It talks about modeling the satellite from launch to orbit using open source data available for not only the launch vehicle, but the type of orbit North Korea could shoot for before the launch actually took place. There is some collision avoidance analysis and discussion on how our launch windows can be calculated based on possible collisions. There is also some analyses on the best placement of defense assets (such as the Aegis) to detect and track the launch. We also talk about how we distinguished a satellite launch from a missile launch and the differences in the trajectory, not just visually but analytically as well. Finally we did some reconstruction of the event after it took place and how you can refine your analyses once new data comes in. Remember, this is just an example of how the software can be used to analyze this event; it’s not a complete analysis of it. I’m the one that narrates the video so if you watch it and have any questions, feel free to post them here and I’ll get back to you as quickly as I can. Click here to watch the video. Enjoy!

Till Next Time,
Rocket Girl (aka Amanda)

We’ve spent some time talking about launch vehicles in this blog; I figured it was time to switch over and talk about how you can do missile trajectory analyses inside of STK. One of the many objects that you can insert into your STK scenario is a Missile Object. So go ahead and open a scenario, go up to the Insert a New Object button and click the down arrow to expand it and select the missile icon.

Now you have a missile object inside your scenario, let’s work on defining it. Once you have the properties browser open for missile object, go to the propagator section and drop down the box to see the different kinds of propagators available. You can see that there are five different methods of defining a missile inside of STK—ballistic, STK external, two-body, HPOP and real-time. Today we are going to take a look at the first one, the ballistic propagator which is just an elliptical path that begins and ends at the Earth’s surface.

In order to define the shape of the trajectory, you need to specify a fixed flight time, initial velocity or altitude. After you set your start time and your step size (remember your step size is the interval between calculated ephemeris output points), we can shape our missile trajectory. First, we have our Launch Latitude and Longitude which can be either in Geodetic or Geocentric. Geodetic is the latitude and longitude of a point on the Earth’s surface determined from the geodetic vertical (normal to the specified spheroid) and Geocentric is the latitude and longitude of a point on the Earth’s surface determined from the geocentric vertical.

There are two ways that you can set your Launch Latitude and Longitude. The first is by simply entering the coordinates. The second is by going to the 2D map and clicking on where you’d like to launch from. Next, we have the Launch Altitude or Launch Radius (Launch Radius is used when you are defining your launch location in terms of Geocentric). After that you have your flight parameter which by default is set to Fixed Delta V, the instantaneous thrust to be applied to the vehicle being launched. Now if you click out your launch and impact points directly on the 2D map, STK will compute the Delta V for you. But you can also specify your Delta V. Here’s a tip, if you set your Delta V to be 0, the minimum Delta V is computed for the launch and impact locations. You can also set:

• Fixed Delta V Min Ecc – the instantaneous thrust, with minimum eccentricity, to be applied to the vehicle being launched. In general it results in a shallower trajectory and may be a better choice when launch/impact points are close or when they are both on side of the descent/accent arc.
• Fixed Apogee Alt – the vehicle’s maximum altitude.
• Fixed Time of Flight – the duration of the vehicle’s flight.

Alright so now that we have our flight parameters defined, let’s look at our impact parameters. We have Impact Latitude – Geodetic or Geocentric, and Launch Elevation. Next is Impact Longitude, or Launch Azimuth. Finally we have the Impact Altitude or Impact Radius. The impact latitude and longitude you can either input manually or use the 2D map click to place. And remember if you use Azimuth and Elevation to specify Impact Location, the only flight parameter available is Fixed Delta V. Here’s a snapshot of what it might look like in STK:

So now you have your missile in there, here’s one more tip for missiles that you might find handy if you are trying to make a video and ever wanted vapor contours. In your missile object properties browser, go down to 3D Graphics -> Vapor Trail. Here is where you turn on the vapor trail, set the size of it, when you want it to start and stop and what part of the model you want it attached too. If you want to take it a step further, you can go up to Model and View the articulations for your model and from there you can turn on the flame texture for the model for added effect! So check it out:

Since we are on the topic of missiles, don’t forget to check out www.agi.com/northkorea for analytical animations and interactive VDFs of the North Korea launch.

Till Next Time,
Rocket Girl (aka Amanda)

As many of you probably know by now, Iridium 33 (a mobile communications satellite) and Cosmos 2251 collided in low-Earth orbit. You might wonder, is there a way to predict such events? In addition to government organizations monitoring space, there are commercial tools that regular folks can use. SOCRATES is the Satellite Orbital Conjunction Reports Assessing Threatening Encounters in Space (I know, a mouthful right?). It’s a service for the satellite operator community run by the Center for Space Standards & Innovation (CSSI) and can be found at www.celestrak.com/SOCRATES (you guys know how much I love celestrak.com so once again thank you Dr. T.S. Kelso!). What SOCRATES allows you to do is run conjunction analysis reports on satellites over a 7-day period and it uses STK to do this STK/Conjunction Analysis Tool (STK/CAT) enables users to identify close-approach situations and compare against the entire NORAD TLE space catalog on an individual satellite or multiple satellites. Now this doesn’t have to be just for satellites you could run CAT analysis on missiles or launch vehicles as well. You can run your own STK/CAT analysis right inside your scenario, all you need is an STK/CAT license (don’t have one? Send an e-mail to support@agi.com and request one).

To set up this analysis in STK, add an AdvCAT object to your scenario and double click to open up the properties. When you open it up you’ll see the Main properties under the Basic Section. Here you set the Time Period that you want to run CAT over or use the Scenario Interval (remember the longer your time period the longer it’s going to take CAT to run; there are a lot of objects it has to run analysis against so keep it short if you can). Next, set your Threshold, which is distance between the objects you want. For example, if you set it to 10km you will get a warning whenever the distance between the threat volumes of the primary and secondary objects is less than that 10 km threshold distance. Alright now jump down to the Primary Objects section. These are the satellites that you are interested in. STK will give you a list of available objects which will include the satellites in your scenario, ephemeris files (.e), and TLE sets by type, date, and name (the satellite database is in there too). Once you find your satellite in the Available Objects list, highlight it and click the blue arrow to move it over to the Chosen section. Once over in the Chosen section you can set the Class type, which is the dimension definition type (Fixed, Orbit Class, Quadratic). Next set the Tangential, this is the dimension of the threat volume ellipsoid along the X axis (parallel to the object’s velocity vector). Then you have the Cross Track or the dimension of the threat volume ellipsoid along the Y axis (parallel to the orbit normal vector). Finally you have the Normal or the dimension of the threat volume ellipsoid along the Z axis (parallel to the cross product of the X and Y axes).

After that’s set, jump down to the Secondary list. These are the objects that present a potential risk of collision with or have a close approach to your primary satellite. Once again these are all the satellites in your scenario plus the satellite database. Select which ones you want to run the analysis against, and then hit the blue arrow to move it over. You have the same options to set as you did with the Primary Object. Now that all your parameters are set, you can go ahead and hit the Compute button to run the analysis. There are some other settings you can make, but this will get you started. Once it’s computed you can go into the Report for StkCAT object and run a couple of different reports to see things like Close Approach by Min Range or Encounter Warnings. So here are a couple of snaps of the AdvCAT properties panel and Close Approach By Min Range report.

Here is a quick metric in case you are wondering about STK/CAT. For runs of approximately 3000 objects against the full catalog (about 12,000), this can typically take about 1.5 hours on a single STK desktop.  This is using a 5 km threshold for an analysis period of 7 days.

Remember there are thousands of objects orbiting our Earth (satellites, debris) and we have to be careful up there.  Here is an image of what the debris from this event three days later:

STK/CAT is here to help you avoid this and all the rest of the objects out there. 

Till Next Time,

Rocket Girl (aka Amanda)

Alright guys so this is the final sneak peek at STK 9. This week I’m talking to Ed Mackey, a special projects engineer, about the User Interface (UI) Plugin functionality coming in STK 9. Why Ed? Ed has already written his own plugin so who better to ask about the topic! Here’s what he had to say:

Don’t forget to visit www.agi.com/stk9seminar to get all the details and to register for the STK 9 Seminar Series taking place on March 17 in Manhattan Beach, CA; Colorado Springs, CO; and Vienna, VA!

Till Next Time,
Rocket Girl (aka Amanda)

Last week we talked about some of the great new usability enhancements that are coming with STK 9. Well I continued to play with the software again this week and found another great enhancement that I think we need to talk about, reports and graphs. Now, you know how in STK 8 to get a report or graph on an object you have to right click on the object, go to the object tools, and then go down to Report or Graph, depending on the form you want your data in? Not so in STK 9 my friends! It’s now much easier. All you have to do is right click on the object and then go down to the Report and Graph Manager and that’s it, you are done. All of your Report and Graph options are now in one place. Here’s another little tip for you. If there is a report or graph that you use a lot for an object, you can right click on the object, go down to Report and Graph Manager and click on the arrow next to it, and to the right it will show you recently used reports and graphs for that object. Kind of like a quick report right there. Here are some images so you can see what I’m talking about. The first one is a comparison of how to find reports and graphs in STK 8 and STK 9. The second is the recently used reports and graphs looks like in STK 9.

Pretty sweet right? Well that’s not the end of it. The new way to create reports and graphs is so much easier! Power users will need to get used to it a bit, but for new users, you have no idea! It’s not just finding how to create a report or graph in STK, it’s also an entire new way of creating these reports and graphs styles. There is a whole new panel to simplify the process and this panel is for every object in your scenario. Here’s what it looks like:

Ok so let’s start with the left side of this panel. Up at the top you now have the option to select what type of object you want to run the report on. In this example, we are going to look at the Missile object.  Once you select the type of object you want, the new Report and Graph tool will pull in all the objects of that type in your scenario for you to choose from, so it’s brought in all the missiles in my scenario. Next you select which missile you actually want to run the report from. Below you can set the time period if you don’t want to default for the report. Now over on the right hand side of the panel we have the report Styles. By default you can see all the report and graph styles that are available for that object together, but if you know you just want to see the reports, you can turn off Show Graph types. The tool bar below is just the tool bar for any other STK object, where you can create new reports/graphs, modify them, delete them, whatever you need to do. Below that we have the list of all the available types of reports and graphs for that object, broken up into two different sections. The top section is called My Styles, where all your custom reports and graphs for that object type live. Below is the usual Installed Styles that come with STK for that object. After that you choose how you want to generate it, whether you want just a Report/Graph or if you want a Dynamic Display or a Strip Chart. Then hit Generate and there you have it!

So that’s it for this sneak peak of STK 9. Check back next week where Ed Mackey and I will talk about the new User Interface Plugin functionality! It should be pretty exciting!!

Till Next Time,

 Rocket Girl (aka Amanda)

I know this blog is supposed to be about launch vehicles and missiles in STK, but I got a chance to try out STK 9 this week and I thought I would share with you guys some of the things that are coming. Now if you went the 2008 AGI Users’ Conference, then you already know some of what’s coming, but I encourage you to read on anyway to learn the rest. For those of you who didn’t attend (and I’m really sorry you didn’t; it was a great event), here are the juicy details!

First off, STK 9 has a lot of new usability enhancements. I know that sounds general and vague, but give me a minute and I’ll show you what I’m talking about. So our Product Management team was hard at work talking to customers and figuring out how to make STK easier to use, from a customer’s point of view. At first glance, yes there are some big changes in the look and feel of STK (I know, change is scary, but take deep breaths and it’ll be OK), but at its heart STK is still the fantastic analysis software that we know and love. First thing you’ll notice after you install STK 9 and start it up is that there is a new panel. Instead of getting Launch Pad as the first thing you see when you open STK, you get the Welcome to STK panel, which lets you create a new scenario, open an existing scenario, learn about STK, or exit STK. Here’s a snap so you can see the different between the two:

Pretty cool, and much easier to just jump in and get started on a scenario. Now if you start a new scenario here, the new Scenario wizard pops up. This allows you to name the scenario, put in a short description if you want, and set the Start and Stop times for the scenario. It’s so easy now to just very quickly create a new scenario—one panel and a few key strokes and your off and running! Once you’ve started your new scenario, this is what it looks like:

Alright, let’s talk about a few new additions that you see in the picture above. The first is the Insert STK Objects Panel. This is new with STK 9 and makes it easier for you to not only insert objects into your scenario, but easier for you to define them as well. Now I’ll admit it does take a bit getting used to, but once you do, you can really fly through adding and defining objects in your scenario. Let’s take a satellite object, for instance. If you want to add a satellite, you’d click on the satellite, then over on the right-hand side of the panel, you define a method for entering it. It can be a GPS Almanac satellite, you can select it from the satellite database, automatically load the GPS constellation, use the Orbit Wizard to define it, use an external ephemeris file, insert an existing satellite file (.sa) that you might already have, define its properties right then and there on the spot, or just insert the default satellite object. Do you see the power of this panel now? If you want the GPS constellation in your scenario, you select Load GPS Constellation, hit Insert…, and you’re done—the Constellation object and all the satellites in the constellation are automatically put in your object browser. That’s it! If you want to add a sensor to those satellites you can do it right from that same panel. Select sensor, select your method, hit Insert, and then you choose what satellite you want that sensor attached to. You’ll see that it makes life much easier. Now here is one tip for you, in the image above, you’ll see that the Select An Object To Be Inserted section of the panel has a Launch Vehicle and Missile Object. These are not default objects in that panel, but they are ones I use a lot. To add them as default objects go to Edit Preferences on that same panel, and then you can select what objects you want to be your defaults. Now if you happen to exit out of this panel and want it back, there is a button up in the toolbar for it. But remember if you like the old way of inserting objects and defining them, that’s no problem. The panels that you know and love are all still there, just the way you were doing it in STK 8. You should really give the new way a try though; I think you might like it.

So what else is new? Check out the 2D and 3D windows, you’ll notice that the toolbars associated with those windows are now attached to the top of the window and you can customize those toolbars to fit your needs. Now something to keep in mind is that the properties browsers for these two windows are now on that toolbar too (the old method for getting to the properties browser for the window is still there), along with View to From, and Globe Manager.

There are also some changes to the Help System (which is already fantastic). But now if you go to Help at the top in the main tool bar, in the drop down you will see Desktop Application Help and Programming Interface Help. So the help is now separated out depending on how you are using the software, making it much easier to find what you are looking for.

These are just some of the usability enhancements that are going into STK 9. There are lots of great module updates in STK/Astrogator (optimize Astrogator right inside of Astrogator), STK/Comm, STK/Radar (radar signal polarization), and STK/Integration (create your own User Interface right inside STK) and much more. But I don’t want to give too much away. Now I know the big question that you have for me is when you can get your hands on STK 9. Well, our development team is hard at work putting the final touches on everything, so it should be out in the next couple of months. Well that’s it for now, I’m going to go back to figuring out the new great things in STK 9 and next week I’ll fill you in on some more details!

Till Next Time, 

Rocket Girl (aka Amanda)