Abstract: In order to improve the positioning accuracy of TV guided missiles, the atmospheric refraction effect was studied. Based on atmospheric refractive model, the high-precision fourth-Order Runge-Kutta ray-tracing method was presented to estimate the atmospheric refraction effect. The location error and angle error were proposed as evaluation parameters to establish atmospheric refraction error model of TV guided missiles. The precision test was performed to verify the reliability and accuracy of ray tracing calculations and atmospheric parameters from radiosonde show the validity of model. Simulations were performed based on five models in the altitude range of 0.5-5 km (0.5 km step length) and in the bow angle range of 2°-45°. The results show that the atmospheric refraction error based on the three-segment model is smaller than that of other models at high altitude. At the same altitude, the bow angle increases 10 times, and the location error and angle error decreases approximately 1000 and 10 times respectively. When the bow angle is 30° the location error is less than 2 m. This method can assist the design of TV guided missile and is significant to availably improve accurately fighting capacity.

Key words: television guiding missiles, atmospheric refraction, ray-tracing, fourth-order Runge-Kutta, location error, angle error