Passive Array Tracking of a Continuous Wave Transmitting Projectile

Abstract

Differential Doppler measurements by a passive array are used to track an unstable continuous wave (CW) source moving in a ballistic trajectory, e.g., a projectile carrying a proximity fuse. The ballistic equations of motion couple frequency measurements at various sections along the track with the track parameters at any arbitrary time, e.g., at impact. A nonlinear weighted leastsquare method is used to estimate the track parameters, and the resulting error covariance matrix is derived. A numerical example demonstrates the relative contributions of various frequency measurements to the estimation accuracy.