Improved wind data processing for the steering of rockets

Wind steering systems for rockets have been very effective in the past, especially in reducing stress due to wind shear and in assuring steering impulse adequacy. This study seeks to optimize the processing of wind sounding data in order to obtain improvements in terms of automation, safeguarding against capricious winds and optimizing certain vehicle design tradeoffs. It is shown that these goals are possible, and furthermore the previous methods involving arbitrary smoothing and selection of steering layers cannot be justified on the basis of computational economy. Equations and flow charts are presented for a processing system which scans the wind sounding, computes steering component wind profiles, recognizes special characteristics, selects steering layers according to their profile characteristics, and designs the steering command sequencing according to functions which best fit the wind profile features in combination with vehicle parameters. An efficient routine applies smoothing only where necessary and should also require fewer iterations in solving the steering equations. Sample profile analyses are given.