Estimation accuracy of a landing point of a ballistic target

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of tracking a re-entry ballistic object by means of radar measurements. Practical applications are in the fields of surveillance for defense and for safety against the re-entry of old satellites. In particular, the investigation determines the estimation accuracy of the impact point of a ballistic target by processing radar measurements during the re-entry phase of the target. In practice, the radar measurements are available only for a limited part of the re-entry trajectory; while it is of interest to estimate the target landing point and its accuracy. This problem is tackled via non linear filtering technique and by resorting to the theory of Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) recently developed for such filters.