STELA

The Semi-analytic Tool for End of Life Analysis (STELA) has been designed by CNES (The French Space Agency) to support the French Space Operations Act. It reflects the standard concerning the protection of LEO and GEO regions (lifetime and protected regions crossing of disposal orbits) and provides the user with tools to assess compliance with the requirements. The software allows efficient long-term propagation of LEO, GEO, and GTO based on a semi-analytical models and assessment of protected regions criteria. STELA produces a report file that summarizes the computation (spacecraft characteristics, initial and final orbits, computation parameters, criteria status) and optionally an ephemeris file.

STELA software includes:

for LEO and GEO an iterative computation mode adjusting the initial orbit to achieve a given atmospheric reentry duration, or to avoid GEO region crossing for a given duration,
a statistical mode for GTO,
a tool that computes the cross sectional mean area of a spacecraft.
Two-Line Elements conversion too

STELA has been developed in Java and is provided as a full executable tool (with GUI) but also as a library. Its flight dynamics methods may thus be used by calling this library.

Instructions for installation:

Download the stela-install-[X.X.X].jar file, where [X.X.X] is the release of STELA.
On Windows: double-click on the setup file stela-install-[X.X.X].jar
On Linux: in a shell, run the installer " java -jar stela-install-[X.X.X].jar "