The General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT) is a modern, open-source spacecraft flight dynamics tool developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland. Thinking Systems has been a key partner in the GMAT design and development process since its inception. GMAT is used for mission planning, design, and operations at GSFC and around the world. The tool is used with the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE), the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and numerous other missions. It is also a key tool for new mission planning at NASA.

The initial release of GMAT was made available for downloading on August 24, 2007. GMAT has been released at least annually since that time. The tool has grown in scope from the initial 2007 beta release, through production releases in 2013 and 2014, and into a tool used operationally for maneuver planning and, starting in 2017, orbit estimation at GSFC. The system is rigorously tested on Windows, Linux, and Mac workstations to ensure a quality product for operational use.

The GMAT system has a robust plug-in architecture, designed at Thinking Systems, that allows for the addition of proprietary or mission specific additions to the system. GMAT's plug-in system has been used for components as simple as new commands for the GMAT scripting language and as complex as integrators and optimizers. The operational GMAT orbit estimation subsystem is coded as a single, complex plug-in component that uses this framework.

GMAT is a free and open source software project, and can be downloaded from the project wiki or directly from SourceForge. Thinking Systems can help your team get started using the tool, and can also provide services to customize GMAT to meet your mission needs.