ORBITALLY DELIVERED KINETIC MISSILE OPTIMUM TRAJECTORY AND KINEMATIC ALGORITHM SELECTION

Abstract

In military operations, speed and accuracy are of great importance, especially when it comes to weapons systems like a missile delivered from orbit. Determining the desired path, or trajectory, requires identifying individual points between the starting position and ending position of an individual vehicle or object constrained by the laws of motion and other dynamic constraints placed on that vehicle. Additionally, modern application of kinematics often assumes rotation about the local wing of an aerospace vehicle is the pitch angle, and makes similar assumptions regarding the roll and yaw angles. These assumptions prevent precise expression of motion in coordinates of rotating reference frames. To make this expression precise necessitates transformation between reference frames, and one such transformation is embodied in the Direction Cosine Matrices formed by a sequence of three successive frame rotations. This thesis tackles these complex problems and produces a candidate trajectory that accurately strikes the desired target with a flight time of 2 hours, 34 minutes, and 46 seconds while impacting with a velocity of 11.54 km/sec. It will also be demonstrated that a specific rotation is the most accurate sequence with an average error of 0.14° and a computational run time of 0.013 seconds, demonstrating a low computational burden. This results in a 97.95% and 99.84% increase in accuracy over two commonly used rotation sequences.