Patent ID: 8639476

Claim:
An automated system for generating an estimation of current position, velocity and acceleration state vectors in an extended Kalman filter, and associated uncertainty covariance of a ballistic target missile, said system comprising: a tensor processor for constructing a state tensor X of the missile from a plurality of passive angle-only infrared measurements by sensors on multiple satellite platforms in Earth-Centered, Earth-Fixed (ECEF) coordinates; a translation processor for translating said state tensor x to coordinates as a transformed state tensor Y; a covariance processor for propagating a covariance matrix P from an approximated state transition matrix Φ and a process noise matrix Q; a tensor updating processor for updating said transformed state tensor Y based on a Kalman gain K and a measurement matrix H; a covariance updating processor for updating said covariance matrix P based on said Kalman gain K and said measurement matrix H; a flight-time estimator for iterating estimation of time-of-flight of the missile from launch based on parameters from said transformed state tensor Y and said covariance matrix P; an analyzer for determining the state vectors of the missile from said time-of-flight; and a display for presenting the state vectors as output.