MPR Error Budget Analysis for Air or Space-borne Missile Surveillance

The Monocular Passive Ranging (MPR) technique, applied from space or a high altitude airborne platform, provides a passive and covert means to establish 3-D position coordinates for tracking theater missiles during boost phase. This capability offers an application potential for missile surveillance and interceptor guidance [Draper et al., 1994, Perlman et al., 1996]. Earlier investigations also have shown that ranges derived from this methodology involved uncertainty associated with: (1) internal weather model, (2) internal missile signature modeling, (3) sensor look geometry accuracy, and (4) measurement data. In this work, analytical error budget assessments are carried out to account all error sources and rank their contributions. In brief, the background residual in measurement data is the most influential error source, dominating mainly on low altitude tracking whereas error induced by source uncertainty is ranked next and dominant at higher altitude tracking. The atmospheric modeling error is ranked third where the scale height uncertainty is more dominant than that of the extinction coefficient. And lastly, the sensor look geometry error is negligible if the pointing uncertainty is small, <0.01%. The overall nominal total random range error is on the order of 2~5 % of the slant depth (path length through the atmosphere) and the magnitude increases drastically near both ends, near the ground and above 25-km altitudes.