Multisensor Miss Distance Measurement System for Test & Evaluation of High Speed Intercepts

Dennis Duven and William Devereux

Abstract:	A multisensor Miss Distance Measurement System (MDMS) has been developed for the SD10 Brilliant Pebbles program to measure and characterize the intercept geometry between a Target Vehicle (TV) and a Kill Vehicle (KV) in upcoming suborbital flight tests. The system is primarily intended to provide information that will be needed to help analyze the cause of a miss if a miss should occur, but it will also provide information on the point of impact when a hit occurs. The MDMS is an integrated package of hardware and software elements necessary to handle all aspects of a complex intercept test, from pre-flight installation and checkout of equipment, inflight generation and recording of sensor measurements, and postflight processing and analysis of the recorded data. The flight elements of the system include a Ballistic Missile Translator to measure the trajectory of the TV, a Global Positioning System/Telemetry Transmitter to measure the trajectory of the KV, a Miss Distance Indicator System to measure the miss distance of the KV relative to four antennas on the TV, and a Lidar Detection System to provide information on the KV’s lidar homing sensor. The S-band downlink signals produced by these elements are received and recorded at receiving stations provided by the missile test ranges. The recorded data are processed and analyzed at a Post-Flight Processing Center located at JHU/APL, where precise estimates of the geometric intercept variables are produced. The MDMS will have an accuracy of 7 m (lo, each axis) in absolute position of either vehicle relative to an earth centered inertial coordinate frame. The accuracy in relative position of the KV compared to the TV will be 2 m (la, each axis), and the accuracy of the PCA estimates will be 0.7 - 1.6 m de pending on where the intercept occurs relative to the TV body.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1993) June 21 - 23, 1993 Royal Sonesta Hotel Cambridge, MA
Pages:	767 - 776
Cite this article:	Duven, Dennis, Devereux, William, "Multisensor Miss Distance Measurement System for Test & Evaluation of High Speed Intercepts," Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1993), Cambridge, MA, June 1993, pp. 767-776.
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