STK 12.2

STK Astrogator now includes dozens of pre-configured sequences — including collections of configuration, differential forces, forced motion, matched forces, rendezvous, and specialized RBar and VBar sequences — that you can insert into an MCS to support complex rendezvous and proximity operations. These sequences reflect the knowledge of decades of operational experience from RPO experts and enable operators to jump into RPO design, analysis, and operations activities with dramatically reduced spin-up time.

STK EOIR's atmospheric database is now available for use with STK Communications. The MODTRAN-based propagation model enables you to model laser communication links using a higher fidelity laser propagation loss model. The MODTRAN output parameters include transmittance.

The Movie Timeline Plugin now includes the option to record movies in parallel using STK Parallel Computing. When recording in parallel, STK uses multiple computing nodes to animate different segments of the video simultaneously. As worker processes finish recording their share of frames, STK ensures proper sequencing and encodes the resulting image files into a video as they become available. We’ve also added two new codecs, H.264 and Apple ProRes. H.264 produces high quality videos while keeping file sizes small. Apple ProRes helps you edit your videos after they’ve been created.

You can now use Jupyter Notebook in STK. This enables you to write Python scripts directly inside STK to automate, analyze, and extend STK scenarios. In addition, the Python API has been extended to provide access to scenario, object, and graphics events, and to the map and globe controls.

When modeling communications system links, you may want to select a transmitter based on more conditions than just geometry. These conditions can include terrain, antenna pointing direction, transmit power, directional gain patterns, the amount of noise in the environment, and more. Previously, you could only select a link based on simple geometry, such as minimum range and maximum elevation angle. Now, you can select communication links based on geometric conditions and RF metrics: Maximum Received Isotropic Power (RIP) or Maximum Carrier to Noise Ratio (C/N).

Working with hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of satellites and associated sub-systems can be daunting, strain the capabilities of analysis tools, and lead to scenarios where the analysis goals are obscured by the sheer volume of objects. As a first step in improving analyses involving large numbers of objects, STK 12.2 introduces the Satellite Collection object — available as a beta capability — for modeling large satellite constellations. This object can model thousands of satellites in a single scenario entity, providing basic visualization, a minimal memory footprint, and efficient save and load operations. Use the Satellite Collection object for your coverage, conjunction assessment, deck access, and communication interference analyses.