Ballistic missile trajectory estimation based on satellite observations

A study on the estimation of the exoatmospheric trajectory of the ballistic missile was presented. The maximum likelihood trajectory estimation problem is very ill conditioned because of poor observability. While the Gauss-Newton iterative algorithm can not be applied, the more sophisticated Levenberg-Marquardt method can be used to overcome the problem. Residual measurement errors in both single and two satellite scenarios were computed by using Monte-Carlo method. The result indicated that this algorithm is efficient.