Impact Point Prediction for Thrusting Projectiles in the Presence of Wind

Wind can and often does significantly affect impact-point prediction (IPP) performance for thrusting/ballistic endoatmospheric projectiles. Wind exacerbates the estimation ambiguity between drag and thrust in the dynamic model and induces additional uncertainty in the IPP procedure. A tracker accounting for the wind effect is presented and simulation study shows that it can be fully compensated if the wind information is available. An N-point adaptive initialization based on a goodness-of-fit test and a statistical significance test is introduced. Based on the multiple interacting multiple model (MIMM) approach developed recently, the IPP performance is investigated with respect to the total observation time and the sensor accuracy in various wind scenarios. In each Monte Carlo (MC) run of the simulation study, under the same sensor accuracy and the same observation time, the same set of random numbers has been used (but different in different MC runs) for the same caliber projectile in various wind scenarios to examine how much the wind affects the IPP performance with/without the exact knowledge of the wind information. The final conclusion is that with the wind effect accounted for, the IPP performance in the presence of wind is practically the same as in its absence.