This investigation addresses a nonlinear terminal guidance/autopilot controller with pulse-type control inputs for intercepting a theater ballistic missile in the exoatmospheric region. Appropriate initial conditions on the terminal phase are assumed to apply after the end of the midcourse operation. Accordingly, the terminal controller seeks to minimize the distance between the commanded missi...

Missile design is often separated into distinct subsystems such as seeker stabilization, target detection and tracking, guidance, and autopilot. The miss distance strongly depends on proper integration of those critical subsystems and the prototyping of visually guided missiles. A low-cost integrated solution based on a PC running Matlab is an attractive option to test new ideas on guidance, co...

2 INTRODUCTION The guided missile provides military forces with the capability to deliver munitions rapidly and precisely to selected targets at a distance. This capability establishes an effective means to conduct a wide variety of military missions that range from denying the enemy communications or supply routes, to establishing air superiority, to performing anti-ship cruise missile or ball...

Apparent design breakthroughs in short-range missile defense systems such as Theater High-Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) have prompted questions about the legality of such systems under the 1972 Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Prominent physicists have used computer “footprint” methodology to prove that if engineered to specifications, THAAD might exceed ABM Treaty performance limits banning ...

This paper describes the technology developed in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) High-Performance Knowledge-Base (HPKB) Program that was transferred to follow-on applications. These applications include the following: 1. A data-mining project using naïve Bayesian networks for the U.S. Marine Corps; 2. A Theatre Ballistic Missile Reasoner project, using Bayesian networks ...

A 48-year-old-woman was struck dead by lightning on October 24, 2010, in Pretoria, South Africa. The cause of death was due to direct lightning strike. Examination showed secondary missile injury on her legs. This secondary missile (shrapnel) injury was caused by the lightning striking the concrete pavement next to her. Small pieces of concrete were located embedded within the shrapnel wounds. ...

The Missile, Research, Development and Engineering Center, MRDEC, of the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command, AMCOM is developing and demonstrating tele-operated missile systems that provide many of the capabilities that the Army has stated it needs. These capabilities include flexible mission planning, improved Identification Friend or Foe, minimum collateral damage, and precision hit. The ...

researchers made significant progress toward developing naval-based theater missile defenses during the Clinton administration, the basic NMD architecture had no naval component because that administration sought actual deployments by 2005–2006. Once in office, the Bush administration was determined to accelerate progress on missile defenses, expand research and development efforts, accept a gr...

A method for the determination of the trajectory of a ballistic missile over a rotating, spherical Earth given only the launch position and impact point has been developed. The iterative solution presented uses a state transition matrix to correct the initial conditions of the ballistic missile state vector based upon deviations from a desired set of final conditions. A six-degree-of-freedom si...