Threat Missile Research Articles

Kill Vehicle Guidance and Control Sizing For Boost-Phase Intercept

This paper addresses some of the guidance and control issues involved in enabling an air-launched interceptor carrying a highly maneuverable kinetic kill vehicle to perform an exoatmospheric intercept of a boosting threat missile capable of traveling many thousands of kilometers. The paper takes the reader through the first iteration of the multi-iteration design process in order to show how much divert and acceleration are required by the kinetic kill vehicle to hit the target. Simplified examples are presented to indicate how conventional guidance and filtering techniques can be used as a starting point in the iterative design process for this important problem in missile defense. More advanced guidance and filtering techniques can be used in subsequent iterations to more accurately size the kinetic kill vehicle and improve system performance and robustness.

Intercept Guidance for Cooperative Aircraft Defense against a Guided Missile

AbstractThis paper focuses on missile guidance methods for a defense missile trying to protect a cooperative aircraft from guided munitions which have the same thrust and maneuvering capabilities as that of the defense missile. A novel guidance law for the missile-to-missile intercept is developed using two lines of sight: one line-of-sight is constructed from the protected aircraft to the threat missile, and the other is from the protecting missile to the threat missile. Potential of the guidance law is demonstrated and discussed with some simulation results; performance comparison with a conventional guidance law is also presented.

Boost-Phase Missile Defense Debate Continues

Boost-Phase Missile Defense Debate Continues

Effectiveness calculations in captive-carry HIL missile simulator experiments

Electronic countermeasures (ECMs) are instrumental in altering the flight path of an incoming active threat missile. To determine the effectiveness of the ECM, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) threat missile simulators are tested in several types of experimental configurations (e.g., closed-loop in an anechoic chamber, open-loop captive-carry held tests on board an aircraft). A new class of modeling and simulation algorithms is presented that allows an accurate miss distance to be calculated from a high-bandwidth ECM captive-carry test result. The techniques combine the results from each test configuration and represent an improvement in evaluating an ECM effectiveness over a singly independent analysis. Anechoic chamber and captive-carry test results from an HIL antiship missile (ASM) simulator are used to demonstrate the algorithms and detail the feasibility of the approach.