Theater Ballistic Missile defense-multisensor fusion, targeting and tracking techniques

Abstract

The Gulf War illustrated how important ballistic missile defenses have become to the United States. The study of intercepting Theatre Ballistic Missiles (TBMs) in their boost phase was prompted by concerns about the widespread dissemination of submunitions and the differentiation of decoys from actual warheads released early in the missile's midcourse flight. Boost Phase Intercept (BPI) would alleviate this problem by destroying the enemy's ballistic missile in the missile's launch phase, thereby causing the lethal payload and debris from the engagement to fall back on the aggressor. This thesis focuses on the development of missile tracking algorithms to be used in the boost phase of TBMs. A missile encounters significant changes in velocity, acceleration, and direction during the boost phase, making it difficult to track. Extended Kalman filter (EKF), Alpha-Beta-Gamma filter, and Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) filtering techniques are developed to determine the missile tracking accuracy of TBMs during boost phase. Simulation results and actual TBM profiles from test data are presented to verify the tracking accuracy utilizing different filtering techniques.