SBIR-STTR Award

The responsiveness of homing missiles can be limited by the requirement to maintain adequate stability characteristics of the homing guidance loop in the presence of guidance errors introduced by radome boresight errors. During the 1980's and beyond U.S. Air-defensive homing missiles will have to operate in an increasingly more complex threat environment. The radome induced performance limitation will become even more restrictive when the missiles are forced to engage threats that have great speeds at high altitudes or that are highly maneuverable at low and moderate altitudes. The pursuit engagement error methodology study will develop analytical methods that trace the influence of the spatial radome boresight errors on homing performance, and will demonstrate the feasibility of specifying boresight error requirements that are based on maintaining an acceptable level of missile system homing performance.

The responsiveness of homing missiles can be limited by the requirement to maintain adequate stability characteristics of the homing guidance loop in the presence of guidance errors introducted by radome boresight errors. The single-plane analysis of phase I has demonstrated that boresight error slopes large enough in magnitude to cause missile instability, do not necessarily result in degraded missile performance if the large slopes occur only for short durations in loop angle. The phase ii study will extend the phase I results by developing the boresight error tolerances for the improved hawk missile, including the effects of radome error cross coupling and missile slowdown. The resulting tolerances and the actual typical boresight characteristics of the current radome will then be used to redesign the guidance computer boresight error compensation to improve the responsiveness of the improved hawk missile during engagements.