Azimuth Elevation Range Data from Tracker to Vehicle Trajectory

Launch Vehicle providers use STK for visualization and analysis of a satellite launch. These customers utilize scripts and custom STK Engine Applications to visualize this launch data in real-time and post-flight. This data sometimes is formatted as Azimuth Elevation Range (AER) Data from a ground or sea-based fixed radar location. If you want to use STK to convert AER data from a fixed location to a LLA position, you can use the following steps:

1. Ingest the Az-El-Range as a Point in the Analysis Workbench
2. Report the position of the Point as LLA using Report and Graph Manager
3. Copy this LLA position and create a new waypoint for a Great Arc Vehicle

These steps however need to be repeated for each point that you have, potentially 1 million times. You will NOT want to do this by hand. I created a simple script Matlab that completes the entire process for a csv with AER data. The code script (and sample file) is available for download, as well as the sample output scenario.



If you are tracking a satellite with this, the process will not be completely effective. Az-El-Range Data is generally pretty raw, biased or errored.  AGI does have an amazing solution for this: You can use our application called the Orbit Determination Tool Kit, or "ODTK" to process this information to produce an accurate satellite orbit. ODTK utilizes a highly accurate processing system which takes raw tracking data in all formats and processes this data through a custom extended Kalman Filter with processed noise and Fixed Interval Smoother, in order to produce realistic satellite position, velocity, biases and perturbing force approximations.