Guidance and control of maneuvering reentry vehicles

Abstract

Over the past fifteen years, studies and flight tests have brought maneuvering reentry technology to a state of relative maturity. During this period, many vehicle configurations have been investigated and many guidance or steering schemes proposed. This paper is intended to summarize those investigations, few of which have been made available to the technical community at large. Three vehicle control configurations (cruciform, bank-to-turn, and fixed trim) and three guidance laws (cross-product, proportional, and tangent cubic) are presented in this paper. Each law is formulated for use with each vehicle configuration. The relative merits and drawbacks of these configurations are discussed.