Area of Interest (AOI)

An Area of Interest (AOI) is a geographic region on the Earth’s surface that you want a satellite to observe or communicate with. AOIs are used as targets in access computations — instead of asking “when can my satellite see a ground station?”, you ask “when can my satellite see this region?”.

AOIs are Earth-only. Moon satellites cannot compute access to Earth AOIs.

Creating an AOI

When you create an AOI, you choose a region type and give it a name and display color.

Region types

Type	Description
Continents	Predefined continental land masses (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Oceania, Antarctica) or all land combined
Countries	Predefined country boundaries, filterable by continent and searchable by name
Custom	Draw a polygon on the globe or upload a GeoJSON or Shapefile file

You can combine multiple regions in a single AOI — e.g. select several countries together.

Custom polygons

In the Custom tab, you can:

• Draw on the globe — click to place vertices, forming a polygon on the 3D globe. You can undo the last point and drag existing vertices to adjust the shape.
• Upload a boundary file — import .geojson, .json, .shp, or a .zip shapefile bundle (.shp + .dbf + .prj). If the file contains multiple features, you can select which ones to include — selected features are combined into a single AOI (MultiPolygon). Point and line features are buffered into area polygons using a configurable radius (km). When a .zip includes a .prj file, projected coordinates are automatically converted to WGS84.

Custom polygons are stored as GeoJSON and rendered on the globe with your chosen fill color, outline color, and opacity.

Display settings

Each AOI has configurable display properties:

• Fill color — the polygon fill color (with a color picker).
• Outline color — the polygon border color.
• Opacity — fill transparency (0–1).

Using AOIs in access analysis

AOIs are used as the target (Object 2) in access computations. You select a satellite (or constellation) as Object 1 and an AOI as Object 2. The computation returns every visibility window — the time intervals when the satellite’s sub-satellite point falls within the AOI polygon.

Illumination filtering

When computing satellite-to-AOI access, you can optionally filter visibility windows by solar illumination conditions on the ground:

Setting	Description
Enable illumination filtering	Toggle on to filter by sun elevation
Mode	Daylight Only (sun above threshold) or Night Only (sun below threshold)
Threshold (°)	Minimum sun elevation angle. e.g. 0° for horizon, 18° for astronomical night

This lets you answer questions like “when can my satellite see this region during daylight?” — useful for optical imaging missions where the ground must be lit.

Sensor-to-AOI access

If your satellite has a sensor defined (via the Scenario or Model tab), you can compute sensor-to-AOI access, which accounts for the sensor’s field of view and pointing direction rather than just the sub-satellite point. This gives you the windows when the AOI is within the sensor’s footprint.

Coverage, Compose Coverage, and Cloud Coverage

From an AOI’s more options menu (...) in the sidebar, you can attach sensor swaths, spatial Figure of Merit heatmaps, and real weather overlays directly to the region:

• Add New Coverage — pairs a satellite and one of its sensors with an activation plan (Access + Pointing, Access windows only, or Target pointing only) to compute cumulative covered area (km²), percentage of AOI covered, and spatial Figure of Merit heatmaps (Simple Coverage, Revisit Count, Mean Revisit Gap, Max Revisit Gap, Response Time). See Coverage.
• Add Compose Coverage — combines multiple individual coverages on the AOI (across different satellites or sensors) into a single fleet-level coverage layer and aggregated coverage report. See Compose Coverage.
• Add Cloud Coverage — overlays real hourly cloud-cover data (forecast and historical reanalysis, provided by Open-Meteo) animated with the scenario timeline. See Cloud Coverage.

Next steps

• Coverage — single-sensor cumulative swaths and Figure of Merit heatmaps
• Compose Coverage — multi-satellite and multi-sensor combined coverage analysis
• Cloud Coverage — real cloud-cover overlay powered by Open-Meteo
• Access — how visibility windows are computed and used
• Satellites — satellite setup and propagation
• Sensor — define sensors for sensor-to-AOI access and coverage