Aided-inertial navigation and alignment performance of a supersonic target missile

Summary form only given. The author describes the aided inertial system developed for an air-launched supersonic low-altitude target (SLAT) missile. Designed for the US Navy to test ship defense systems, the vehicle was required (worst case) to fly accurately for long ranges without any position updates after launch. The crux of the problem was to design a prelaunch alignment filter that would minimize the inertial attitude errors at launch and thus the end-of-flight position errors due to boost acceleration. A filter sizing and tuning study was performed, and predicted accuracy was studied based on covariance analysis. These results have been compared with navigation performance measured during actual flight tests. The effects of different range-based tracking systems on overall navigation accuracy have also been investigated