AAS 97-610
IMPACT ERROR SCALING METHODS FOR MISSILE ACCURACY STUDIES
D. Hitzl and T. Merz - retired K. Last and J. Nakanishi - deceased, B. Marshall - Lockheed Martin
Abstract
The problem of scaling impact errors from an actual trajectory to a nominal trajectory is examined. In actual missile flight tests, after all system level effects are removed, the residual impact errors at splashdown are considered to arise solely during reentry body separation. In order to assess these impact errors in a uniform and consistent fashion, the actual impact errors obtained from a wide variety of off-nominal flights are transformed to comparable impact errors for a nominal trajectory. In this paper, we examine seven methods to perform this transformation, or scaling, of the residual downrange and crossrange impact errors. All methods produce consistent values for the scaled crossrange errors while four methods produce reliable estimates for the much more sensitive downrange error. These computational results are explained in some detail.