ODTK 7.4 Release Notes
ODTK 7.4 is a minor release with two new features and some additional improvements. You are encouraged to read thoroughly all release notes to understand how you may benefit or be impacted if upgrading from a previous version.
Feature items
Initial geolocation
ODTK now supports the estimation of Earth-based facility positions based on SB TDOA measurements between several satellites and an emitter on the facility. You can now:
-
Add an InitialGeolocation object under a Facility object
-
Configure the InitialGeolocation to use either four collector satellites or three collector satellites
- Use an InitialGeolocation object to generate facility position estimates
-
Transfer the estimated facility position to the facility object
Central body ephemeris
ODTK now has the ability to estimate corrections to central body ephemerides. This is important for missions to small bodies, such as asteroids, for which highly accurate ephemerides are not available. You can turn on this option through the Scenario.CentralBodyList attribute. When estimating corrections to nominal central body ephemerides, ODTK will generate updated ephemeris for the selected central bodies in the SPICE BSP format.
Scripting documentation change
In the ODTK Help, the "Integrating with ODTK" section has an improved structure and organization. The section overview has a diagram that clearly shows how you can interact with ODTK, with or without using the application UI. The biggest change to the Help is that the topic formerly known as the ODTK Scripting Guide no longer exists as a single long document. It is now broken into organized subsections and topics, which improves your ability visualize the constituent parts and find specific topics quickly.
Corrected issues and additional enhancements in ODTK 7.4
In addition to the new features, this release also provided additional enhancements and technical corrections from the last release.
| Additional Enhancements and Resolved Issues in ODTK 7.4 | |
|---|---|
| Tracking No. | Description |
| 111943 | ODTK now has a utility called SmallForcesFileImporter. It receives a small forces file with velocity data and converts it into a set of finite maneuvers. |
| 113345 | ODTK now supports the CCSDS AEM attitude file format for satellite attitude files. You should assure that these attitude files use the *.caem extension so that ODTK can recognize them. |
| 113959 |
The ODTK Scenario File Compare tool is now available. With it you can perform the following analyses:
You can find it under Program Files/AGI/ODTK7/ODTK/AppData/Scripts/OdtkFileCompareTool.htm. |
| 113960 | The Residual Versus Reference Utility now accepts biases via a run file or measurement bias correction file. This update includes the deprecation of the Filter attribute Filter.ModelMeasOnlyWithRefEphem. The new way of setting the measurement model is to use the Filter.MeasurementModelingMode enumeration, which is under ProcessControl. |
| 114084 | ODTK now support the capability to override internal validity checks (visibility, low, elevation, etc.) for acceptance of measurements in Filter and Least Squares objects and for generation of measurements in the simulator. You can set this through the OverrideValidity attribute. |
| 114138 | You can now select and use DE440/441 planetary ephemeris files in the Scenario property: PlanetaryEphemeris > Filename. |
| 114293 | The functional attribute Scenario.Measurements.PreviewTrackingData now includes the list of trackers, satellites, and facilities on a per file basis in addition to the cumulative lists already provided. |
| 114432 | The Solar Pressure force model now has an option to enable boundary mitigation, which reduces the error incurred when crossing changes in lighting conditions. |
| 114450 |
AGI changed the default source of geomagnetic index data (Ap) for the IRI ionosphere model to be the nominal space weather file (SpaceWeather-All-v1.2.txt). As part of this change, the settings
are now deprecated. Their replacements are, respectively:
|
| 114867 | There is now an option to use plugin modules that implement the SGP4 interface. These modules follow the same interface as those used in STK. The ODTK implementation is limited to generation of TLEs from ephemeris files. |
| 115287 | When you run the simulator and Least Squares, any out-of-date EOP files now produce warning messages. |
| 115293 | For *.pyrpt files that the Static Product Builder uses, all spaces have changed to underscores. |
| 115358 | ODTK can now process the DSN Interferometric Narrowband Spacecraft (INS) measurement type. DSN INS measurements are differenced one-way Doppler measurements that you can construct in ODTK through the GenerateDOWD and GenerateDOWDFromFiles application-level functional attributes. These measurements are especially useful in early orbit operations before two-way tracking is available. |
| 115372 | The script generating the "Instant Maneuver Summary" report is now compatible for pandas module versions 1.2.5 and above. |
| 115386 | Output ephemeris files containing 6x6 position/velocity covariance now have a covariance interpolation method specifier to enable covariance interpolation in STK. |
| 115564 |
There are two new GNSS Receiver satellite selection options, which improves simulation flexibility when generating GNSS measurements. The new CustomIntervals option accepts an explicit list of intervals for each PRN and the new ImportMeasSchedule option will reflect the satellite selection found in tracking data files assigned in the Scenario.Measurements.Files list. The GNSS Receiver setting MeasurementProcessing.NumberOfChannels is now located in MeasurementProcessing.SatelliteSelection.NumberOfChannels to better reflect its use in simulation. This maintains backwards compatibility for scenarios and scripting. The GNSS Receiver setting MaxPhaseRangeGap has been removed, as its associated functionality has not been part of any released version of ODTK. |
| 115565 | The fix corrects an error in the Residuals vesus Reference HTML tool. The error prevented use of the tool when a satellite had initial conditions indicating a hyperbolic orbit. |
| 115645 | This fixes an error when the simulator ran with OutputByPass enabled for the output tracking data files. ODTK was not properly closing the base tracking data outputfile, which prevented the simulator from running more than once without either exiting ODTK or changing the output file name. When the error occurred, the affected file had zero size and did not contain any simulated measurements. |
| 115852 | This adds missing property descriptions in the Help for IAgODGenericObs. |
| 116111 | The default Scenario Epoch is now 1 Jul 2021 12:00:00.000 UTCG. |
| 116162 | The BEIDOU catalog file now reflects decommissioning and reassignments related to PRN 1 and PRN 18. |
| 116189 | There is an improved error message for the case when a GPS Receiver and satellite initial state epoch are more than 1e-06 seconds out of sync. The new message now provides the GPS Receiver epoch to at least six decimal places. |
| 116200 | This corrects an error in the construction of certain DOWD measurements. The error occurred when using raw 3L Doppler measurements for which the pilot tone of one of the raw measurements was not represented properly as part of the DOWD measurement. The update also includes these improvements: (1) adding consider-based deweighting of observations when relay satellite ephemerides are not estimated and (2) adding the effects of the troposphere and ionosphere based on user settings. |
| 116233 | For the CCSDS Orbit Ephemeris Message (OEM) format, the output of covariance information in the Gaussian (RIC) frame now includes the COV_REF_FRAME keyword in the covariance entries. |
| 116245 | This adds the frame kernel (FK) file in support of the ceres.bsp (SPICE) ephemeris file. ODTK can now correctly use the SPICE file to model the orbit of Ceres. |
| 116258 | There is now an input length limit check for erroneous Date strings in YYMMDD.dddddd format. |
| 116259 | The "Residuals with Bias" graph style now groups the measurement bias values by bothTracker Name and Measurement Type. Previously, the graph style grouped measurement bias values only by Tracker Name, and for cases of more than one measurement type, the graph style was incorrectly connecting their independent measurement biases. |
Unresolved issues affecting the current release
You should be aware of the following limitations and unresolved issues affecting ODTK as of the date of this release.
| Known Issues | |
|---|---|
| Tracking No. | Description |
| 07071 | Tracker satellites cannot share tracking IDs with GPS constellation PRN numbers. If a scenario contains both an optical tracker satellite and a GPS constellation and the tracker satellite has a tracking ID between 1-36, the tracking ID will become ambiguous. |
| 23349 | LaunchPad doesn't format dates in local format. It always uses MM/DD/YYYY, even if your machine is configured to show dates as DD/MM/YYYY. |
| 30517 | The Plugins tab does not refresh the SupportsSave column. When you add a new plugin tracking data reader and click Apply, the column labeled SupportsSave is not refreshed. By default, the value in this column is false, but after you add a new tracking data reader that supports save, then the value in this column should be true. You must dismiss the panel and pull it back up to get the correct value. |
| 31034 | After a long predict, the covariance is quite large. A very large measurement update can drive the filter covariance negative. |
| 31802 | A GPS constellation object does not populate the PRNList until properties are applied. We suggest that when you first assign a source file to a GPS constellation, you press Apply before double-clicking on the PRNList to view its contents. |
| 32139 | State File To SP3 utility limits output to GPSSatellites named PRN01, PRN02, etc. |
| 36839 | If ODTK aborts or runs out of disk space, then any active runfile is not saved in a valid state. This issue cannot be corrected without a big impact on processing speed due to opening and closing the file and opening to append. You should monitor disk utilization and plan for large run files from ODTK to avoid disk space issues. |
| 42672 | Dynamic Earth Data does not use file find paths. Do not attempt to change the location from the default location. |
| 45226 | ODTK does not support saving and loading of files that use multi-byte character sets. |
| 100422 | When using native support for 4K displays, the Object Properties tree [+] and [-] boxes do not scale properly and will appear very small. |
| 110488 | In deep space mode, the simulator runs in two stages. In the first stage, it generates ephemeris over the analysis period plus an interval of time before the analysis period to account for light time delay (LTD). The simulator ignores any maneuvers in this LTD interval, so any measurements generated under the case where the signal would have been at the satellite before the end of the maneuver will be incorrectly modeled. |
| 113157 | Adding non-EOP txt files, particularly SOLFSMY.txt, to the EOP properties causes ODTK to crash rather than just producing an error. |