Prediction of missile trajectory

This study concerns the survivability of an airship that is under attack by a missile. The pilot may employ an appropriate manoeuvre or countermeasure at the right moment to escape from the attack. Real-time prediction of the missile trajectory will help prepare the pilot to take action at the right moment to survive. The missiles considered have a short boosting period followed by a nonpowered period. The proposed technique takes some missile trajectory data at the early stage of the nonpowered period to estimate two of the most important missile parameters for predicting the future trajectory. The complete flying course of the target airship must be known for the prediction. Nine sets of trajectory data, three sets from each of three different types of missiles, are available for this study. One of these nine is not used because the impact happens during the boosting period. The developed technique generated good prediction results on these missile flyout data. One merit of the proposed technique is that no a priori knowledge about the missile is needed. Indeed, throughout this study, no information about these missiles has been made available to this researcher. Prediction for the earlier trajectory of the missile including the boosting period has not been studied but relevant issues have been addressed and discussed in the introduction and discussion sections.