Terminal Seeker Pointing-Angle Error at Target Acquisition

Missile terminal guidance seekers that employ optical, infrared, or radar sensors to acquire, lock-on, and track their target are subject to a missile-to-target line-of-sight pointing error during the acquisition phase. The error is due primarily to missile navigation errors (attitude and position) and inaccuracies in predicting the target location. The computational process to obtain the seeker-to-target pointing vector is formulated. Linear perturbation ion of the pointing vector yields the pointing-angle error tions.quaons. A simple quantitative example is given.