The General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT): A New Resource for Supporting Debris Orbit Determination, Tracking and Analysis

The General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT) was initially developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) as a high accuracy orbital analysis tool to support a variety of space missions. A formal agreement has recently been established between NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to further develop GMAT to include orbit determination (OD) capabilities. A variety of estimation strategies and dynamic models will be included in the new version of GMAT. GMAT will accommodate orbit determination, tracking and analysis of orbital debris through a combination of model, processing and implementation requirements. The GMAT processing architecture natively supports parallel processing such that allow it can efficiently accommodate the OD and tracking of numerous objects resulting from breakups. A full first release of the augmented GMAT capability is anticipated in September 2009 and it will be available for community use at no charge.