Installing GMAT

Key Points

- The best place to get the latest version is from SourceForge, not the NASA website

- The installation instructions included with SourceForge aren’t quite right. The instructions below may help answer some questions.

Step-by-Step Download and Install Instructions

1. Go to: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gmat/

Note! The latest version is not on the NASA website. If you Google “NASA GMAT”, the NASA-hosted versions are older than the version on Source Forge. The newest version is at least 2020a.

2. If you want SourceForge to auto-detect your operating system and guess which version to send you, click the big, green “Download” button. I’ve tested the link on Windows and it works just fine.

3. But if you want to make sure you get the right version (Ubuntu, Windows, Mac, etc…), click the “Files” tab.

4. Open the “GMAT” folder. You should see all the versions NASA has released over the years.

5. Open the top folder. (As of this writing, it’s GMAT-R2020a). You should see zipped/compressed files for different operating systems.

6. Find the version for your operating system from the list. Clicking on it will take you to another screen that automatically downloads the file after a few seconds.

7. Unzip the file in whatever location you’d like

Note: Their README says it comes with an “Installer” but that does not seem to be true in 2020a. When you unzip things into the folder you made, GMAT is now “Installed”.

Running GMAT on Windows

To run GMAT on Windows, you need to navigate through the files where you unzipped things.

1. Open the folder you unzipped the file into. On Windows, you should see something like this:

2. Open the folder called “bin”

3. Double-clicking on the file called “GMAT.exe” will run GMAT