The missile I am most familiar with uses inertial (gyroscope/accelerometers)
and star sightings for navigation, and is very accurate.

Some cruise missiles use forward and/or down looking radar and do terrain
comparisons along with inertial navigation.

For a missile that is fired at a moving target, there are a bunch of ways to
guide it:  Heat seeking, radar guided, wire guided, TV remote control, etc.

So how do you knock one out of the sky?  Hit it with something, preferable
as early as possible even if you just knock it off course or damage it
enough that it can't guide itself.  Actually doing it is extremely
difficult.


John

-----Original Message-----
From: M. Adam Davis [mailto:adavis@UBASICS.COM]
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 11:08 AM
To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: [OT]: How to knock a missile out of the sky...?


I'm curious.  With Chinese military officials speculating they are going
to be at war with tiawan within 5 years, and the US indicating that their
missile defense shield may be deployed on tiawan...  (and let's leave the
political discussion out of this, please :-)

Are there other methods of knocking out or disabling a missile in flight
without being close to it?

Do any modern missiles use GPS, and if so does the US have the capability
of performing real-time modification to the GPS signal?  (I'm thinking -
determine the trajectory and most likely target, then change the GPS
signal incrementally so that the target is now located in the ocean - this
would work well for multiple missiles on multiple targets (sure, we moved
New York to Michigan which knocked california's missiles into the ocean,
but is that *really* an improvement?  MI may not think so... ;-))

What are typical guidance systems used for missiles?

I'm assuming there are accelerometer/gyro guidance, but can that be very
accurate?  Are ground based radio systems in wide use?  Is Russia's GPS
equivilant system in use at all?

Anyway.  Just some musings I've been having recently...  I suppose this
has a lot to do with robot guidance, as well....

-Adam




The article about the war prediction I read is here:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=21634

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