Tactical and Strategic Missile Guidance

by Paul Zarchan

The fourth edition of this best-selling book has three new chapters on important topics related to missile guidance. The first new chapter shows how the guidance problem can be reformulated so that a new guidance law can be derived that both hits the target using minimum energy and, in addition, travels on a desired trajectory. This type of guidance is important in applications in which the trajectory must be shaped for either sensor or lethality considerations. Intentional or unintentional spiraling maneuvers on the part of a tactical ballistic missile can also make it particularly difficult for a pursuing missile to hit. The second new chapter explores the various filtering options that can be used to estimate the necessary states for using advanced guidance techniques. As with other material in the text, this chapter uses a step-by-step approach in explaining and deriving the various filtering options. The third new chapter approaches the guidance problem from a totally different perspective that is often used by the space community. In this new chapter it is shown how a predictor-corrector type method can be applied to a problem in which other more conventional guidance laws are also applicable. Together with numerous new examples and easy-to-understand graphs and explanations, readers with varied learning styles will find Tactical and Strategic Missile Guidance a staple for any aerospace engineer?s library. Companion software, in both Macintosh and IBM-compatible versions, contains source code listings in FORTRAN, C, and MATLAB® languages. A detailed set of appendices not only serves as a user?s guide but also explains how the text?s FORTRAN source can easily be converted to either C or MATLAB. The conversion technique plus detailed source code examples will be tools of interest to all engineers, regardless of whether you specialize in missile guidance or other aerospace-related fields.

743 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1990

About the author

Paul Zarchan has more than 40 years of experience designing, analyzing, and evaluating missile guidance systems. He has worked as Principal Engineer for Raytheon Mission Systems Division and has served as Senior Research Engineer with the Israel Ministry of Defense and has worked as Principal Member of the Technical Staff at C.S. Draper Laboratory. Mr. Zarchan is currently working on problems related to missile defense as a Member of the Technical Staff for MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He is author of Tactical and Strategic Missile Guidance, Fifth Edition and co-author of Fundamentals of Kalman Filtering: A Practical Approach, Third Edition.

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