A Telemetry-Based Post-flight Wind Profile Estimation Method for Air-to-Surface Missiles

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ORIGINAL PAPER

A Telemetry-Based Post-flight Wind Profile Estimation Method for Air-to-Surface Missiles Seok-Woo Kim1,2 · Han-Lim Choi2 Received: 25 April 2020 / Revised: 23 August 2020 / Accepted: 22 September 2020 © The Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences 2020

Abstract This paper presents a wind profile estimation method for test flight of a short-range air-to-surface missile. The method integrates the telemetry data (e.g., navigation data, fin control history), empirical regional wind profile data, and a high-fidelity flight dynamics simulator to infer on the vertical wind profile that the missile has experienced during the flight. The inference procedure works in a sequential fashion: (a) starting from the launching altitude, random winds are sampled from seasonal rawinsonde data, (b) the wind that matches best to the simulated trajectory using the telemetry data is chosen, (c) the updated wind distribution at the altitude is used as the prior information for the next altitude layer, and (d) this process is repeated. Simulation studies with high-fidelity simulator are performed to validate the proposed estimation method, highlighting its robustness against variation in wind profiles and flight conditions. Keywords Wind estimation · Air-to-surface missile · Time interval Monte Carlo simulation · High-fidelity six-degree-offreedom simulator · Conditionally distributed random wind

1 Introduction Wind changes the trajectory of a flight object. Especially, for an air-to-surface missile that is launched at a high altitude in high-speed winds and flies at a subsonic speed, the wind the missile has experienced throughout the flight makes a significant impact on the maximum range of the missile. Missile developers are often asked to demonstrate the maximum range in no-wind conditions as a performance indicator of a missile for fair assessment of the performance regardless of environmental conditions. Therefore, a methodology that systematically calibrates the test flight results under some wind conditions to the no-wind condition is needed; this leads to the estimation of vertical wind profile experienced by the missile during the flight. This wind estimation is also necessary to analyze the correct flight characteristics after the test flight. In the past, to obtain the wind conditions during test flights, high-altitude winds were measured near the test site

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Han-Lim Choi [email protected]

1

Agency of Defense Development, Daejeon, Republic of Korea

2

Department of Aerospace Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Republic of Korea

using the rawinsonde before and after flight time [1]. Because rawinsonde measures winds at different times and locations with the missile’s flight, it is different from the wind experienced by the actual missile. For the purpose of visual check for the safety, a chase plane can follow the launched missile’s trajectory. The chase plane can also measure the wind on the nearby trajectory of the missile in real time [1]; this is known t