Atmospheric Reentry Dispersion Correction Ascent Phase Guidance for a Generic Reentry Vehicle

Abstract

Launch vehicle explicit guidance mechanism depends on the estimation of the desired burnout conditions and driving the vehicle to achieve these conditions. The accuracy of the vehicle at the target point depends on how tightly these conditions are achieved and what is the strategy used to define the trajectory. It has been observed inthe literature that most of the guidance mechanisms during reentry use vacuum guidance equations that is durin greentry the atmospheric effects are not considered. In order to achieve minimum miss distance at the target point theat mospheric effects are to be considered during the guided phase and appropriate corrections should be executed,otherwise depending on the reentry flight path angle and ballistic coefficient the errors can be as high as tens of nautical miles. In this paper, the authors develop a novel approach to these vacuum guided launch vehicle problems.The paper elaborates how to calculate a prior the reentry dispersion during the ascent phase guidance and provide guidance corrections such that the terminal conditions are achieved with higher accuracy.

Defence Science Journal, 2013, 63(3), pp.233-241, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.63.3733