Just download the Intelsat scenario and you’ll get all of the satellite and ground stations ready to go in an STK scenario. Don’t know much about satellites, but need to do RF analysis on the Intelsat network? No problem. Not only can you search and retrieve standard STK objects such as satellite, facilities, and aircraft but you can download scenarios of standard space systems that are ready to be customized for your particular analysis. I mentioned our cloud-based server, which is our implementation of the STK Data Federate hosted as a service to our users. Also targeted for the next interim release, the search bar will include your local databases – which means one location to find key STK data online or offline. This is just the initial release of our search capability and we already have test versions of the software that includes search or conversion to area targets and aircraft performance models. Simply select your match and voila – it’s in STK and ready for action. For starters we now have a master search tool bar which allows you to free form type the satellite, street address or place of interest or facility name, and STK will go out and search our licensed geocoder and our cloud-based data server for all the matches. With STK 10 we are moving that to the forefront. For years we have been collecting facility data, associated az/el masks and historical satellite data (TLEs). One of our goals for STK 10 was to start converting our community from a “create your data” mentality to a “select your data” mentality. Other users might not even realize that they can go to the TLE database and simply search for “imaging” satellites because they did not even know what the TLE database was and that the TLE database was a good place to look. Although very powerful and robustly implemented, all of that streamlining over the years primarily benefited the space community. Over the last 10 years, we had already started with things like reading TLE catalogs and creating Walker constellations, then we evolved to auto-updating the TLE catalog and providing the GPS almanac. But since our system is supposed to be broadly applicable, we took incremental steps to make it that way. Data availability STK originally had a “create your data” workflow as the default (pretty much the only choice other than external or real-time data) which was great and probably preferable to our space customers. Make STK look and behave the way you want toģD for everyone I talked about this before so I’m not going to rehash it in-depth again – basically we realize everyone loves 3D and everyone expects 3D – and ours is simply more powerful from an engineering standpoint than the other players, so now you can have it.Now let’s take a deeper look at my second point, STK is in itself a system and we have made a concerted effort to make it more broadly applicable with our upcoming v10 release. To be honest, we could have just changed the name on any of one of our past releases and called it a day – because our users are the ones who have transformed the product from Satellite Tool Kit to Systems Tool Kit. However, STK has been used for many years for these applications, plus, the standard space stuff like GPS performance modeling, launch window analysis, space rendezvous operations, laser clearing, RF interference mitigation studies, conjunction analysis, link budget analysis and so on. Would you use something called Satellite Tool Kit for UAV mission planning? Operational multi-INT data fusion for situational awareness? Logistics tracking and range safety on DoD test ranges? Missile threat modeling? Probably not. So what kinds of systems does STK model and evaluate? From super-scientific uses like modeling the orbit (and eventual touchdown) and coverage around a 33-km long potato-shaped asteroid to out-of-the-box ones such as tracking elephants in Malaysia or determining the position covariance of boreholes for oil rigs, our users have always amazed us with their applications of “Satellite Tool Kit.” But the name hasn’t fit the use cases for some time. According to Merriam-Webster, a system is “a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole.” STK is capable of modeling and evaluating systems and is, in itself, a system.
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