Prediction of Instantaneous Impact Point of Launch Vehicle, Including Drag Effect

This study proposes an application algorithm for two existing methods to predict the instantaneous impact point of a rocket. The effect of atmospheric drag was modeled to improve the accuracy of the prediction. The Keplerian method assumes that a launch vehicle is in ballistic motion in a global coordinate system. The other method predicts the instantaneous impact point of long-range artillery, which includes modeling the drag effect during free-fall in the local coordinate system. Combining the two methods based on critical altitude improved the prediction accuracy while maintaining real-time performance. The proposed method allows users to select the parameters for the method, which can regulate the prediction accuracy and real-time performance. The performance of the proposed method was verified by comparing it with the performance of the Keplerian method, which is conventionally used for the instantaneous impact point prediction of launch vehicles.