

Digital mission engineering is best applied early and often, from design through development, test, operations, and sustainment. This kind of analysis might like something that comes at the end of your project's life cycle - once your system is designed - the truth is quite different. The Object Attributes, Calc Objects, and Parameters you have defined are all available as variables to your script.Ansys Digital Mission Engineering products are designed to extend digital engineering to the mission - the operational environment in which your systems and systems of systems must succeed. I wrote this one in Matlab, but you also have the choice of JScript or VBScript too. The scripting part of the Scripting Tool is at the bottom.For example, I assign the guesstimate for the burn location to the Target_Sequence.Propagate object’s StoppingConditions.Argument_of_Latitude.TripValue attribute and the guesstimate for the DeltaV magnitude to the Target_Sequence.Maneuver object’s attribute. The Object Properties panel on the left is where the Scripting Tool actually interacts with the objects in the MCS itself.The initial and final RAAN values are set as Parameters.

All without leaving the comfort of our Astrogator panel – no external tools required! And if our inputs change? No problem – just update the values in the Parameters to compute new initial guesses! The Scripting Tool panel is shown below: Some highlights: Yay! We can use those equations, along with the Astrogator Scripting tool, to form initial guesses of the location and magnitude of the maneuver to help our differential corrector converge more quickly! Astrogator will then refine those initial guesses using its high fidelity propagators to give us our final answer.

So what are we to do? Well, we can dust off the old Astrodynamics book, and find that there is a simple analytical two-body solution for this type of maneuver. Sounds easy enough! Unfortunately, 200 iterations later, we find that the differential corrector is having trouble converging. The simplest Astrogator setup for this problem involves targeting the time of the burn (so that it occurs in the correct location) as well as its magnitude and direction.
