Terminal Guidance for Impact Attitude Angle Constrained Flight Trajectories

Abstract

The design of a suboptimal terminal guidance system for reentry vehicles with a constraint on the body attitude angle at impact is studied. Permissible range of the miss distance and the body attitude angle at impact is specified. The problem is formulated as a linear quadratic control problem. The Riccati equation is derived to provide time-varying feedback gains. The desired scheme is suboptimal. The region of initial states for which the system meets the specifications becomes smaller as the initial height of the reentry vehicle at initial time is decreased.