Ballistic missile boresight and inertial tracking system and method

Abstract

A coarse/fine alignment system and method for boresighting high energy, laser pulses onto ballistic missiles in their boost phase. A ground based, common optical aperture laser separator, a mosaic array sensor, and a controller are cooperative to align bursts of light of a ground based laser with a beacon laser of a satellite reciprocally along an uplink therebetween so that the wavelength of the bursts and the wavelength of the beacon laser are the same wavelength. The principle of propagation reciprocity operates to provide ultra high alignment accuracy. Light provided along the reciprocal optical path provides boresight blooming autocollimation and an ultra high pointing angle resolution. An inertial target tracker provides spacial coordinates and angular rate coordinates of remote targets sited by the tracker. A single mosaic array sensor and associated systems are operative to provide pseudo-star, target spot, and other sensor spots compensated for vibration and other noise phenomena. Shared, sensor spot narrow bandwidth and a common wavelength contribute to a high measure of noise immunity. Beam expander/compressor magnification makes possible ultra high accuracy position and angular rate inertial frame coordinate determinations from the vibrationally stabilized spots of pixel size. A tracker mission mirror controllably aligns a high energy laser light from a destination to a target.