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The Peacekeeper missile’s navigation suite (2019)
- martinky24 4y agoSo many ads on the site, a bit unreadable even though I am interested in the subject matter. Maybe it’s better off of mobile. Ah well.
- dylan604 4y agoyawn. install the right extensions, use reader mode, etc, and just be done already.
- NavinF 4y ago> Maybe it’s better off of mobile
- dylan604 4y ago>install the right extensions or app
- cokeandpepsi 4y agothat's not the sort of app the app store would tell you
- dylan604 4y agofunny, as Apple specifically promoted the fact that you could install blockers with whatever iOS update they released. android has versions of the same desktop blockers. so i'm really confused on your suggestion
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
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- ethbr0 4y agoHigh accuracy inertial measurement and star tracking are insane, especially against the technology level when they were developed. But I guess they prove that when you work on an existential weapons problem, with a superpower's budget, "technically reasonable" is a lesser concern than "feasible at all".
- pinewurst 4y agoThe book to read is Inventing Accuracy by Donald MacKenzie
- sho_hn 4y agoOoh. This sounds like a good follow-up to my reading of Simon Winchester's "The Perfectionists" - a history of precision engineering, which starts of discussing the difference between precision and accuracy.
- dismalpedigree 4y agoThe perfectionists is a phenomenal book. I highly recommend.
- twoodfin 4y agoThe MIRV test photo is nightmare fuel. Apocalypse with mathematical precision.
- dylan604 4y agolooks like 1980s missile command with a cool background
- chasd00 4y agoThere’s a nuke museum in Albuquerque NM that has a mirv dispenser with a bunch of inert warheads laying in a pile of other stuff. They also have a bunch of old icbms including a peacekeeper in the back outside like a Cold War junk yard. I think they even have the gun that fired a nuke artillery shell off to the side by the back fence. It’s quite a surreal museum.
- baking 4y agoDesigned by Draper Labs, manufactured by Northrup. My father-in-law worked on inertial guidance for Draper and retired in 1989, but I don't know if he ever worked on this project. Some things he wouldn't talk about because of security clearances. He did work on the Trident INS.
- missedthecue 4y agoMy dad worked on the Trident guidance in the 1980s for Singer Kearfott. Very interesting career. Specifically, he improved the celestial navigation suite in the guidance system. The missile could determine it's location and plot it's course based on the location of the stars.
- patentatt 4y agoThat sounds like an interesting challenge with today's technology. It's so impressive that this was accomplished at scale with Cold War era technology levels.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoThe title and the site's abstract says "Peacemaker" but it seems to be about the well-known Peacekeeper missile.
- dylan604 4y ago"I cherish peace with all of my heart. I don’t care how many men, women and children I kill to get it." These'll definitely help ratchet up that body count
- colechristensen 4y agoNuclear weapons ushered in a period of peace never before seen in human history. Death rates in war have been at historic lows post WWII.
- raisin_churn 4y agoPost hoc ergo propter hoc
- alex_sf 4y agoOk, then what else explains the long peace?
- drewm1980 4y agoUnsustainable prosperity fueled by fossil fuels.
- alex_sf 4y agoWe had fossil fuels during both world wars.
- fjkgfifjfuvf 4y agothe many men, women and children they kill daily to get it. just because there's no colonial empires fighting each other, doesn't mean there's peace.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoActually related to one of my favorite photographs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper#/media/File%3APeacekeeper-missile-testing.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper#/media/F...
- Victerius 4y agoThe fact that nuclear-tipped multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV) have never been tested with live explosives is both a good thing, and a missed photographic opportunity :(
- themodelplumber 4y agoIt's a great photo, as interesting historical photography goes anyway. Raises some questions for me: 1) What's the light source for the warheads, are they glowing with reentry heat or is it something else? 2) What's the warhead-warhead distance in this shot? Was it programmed to fit a tactical pattern like "fleet destruction" of 1-mile warhead-to-warhead? 3) Is this a radial pattern or linear? Seems like it's either radial or there's some significant amount of error that's observable. But it might depend on #2 above. 4) The inertial system was not inside each warhead, right? But rather inside the missile itself? 5) Did they chopper & swim out and retrieve this stuff? Wouldn't want the other side to capture it for intel, I'd guess... ...and probably more...
- andbberger 4y agoreentry heat, i don't know, i don't know, yes, destroyed on impact it's coming in at like mach 25
- srvmshr 4y ago1. Re-entry heat glows the MIRVs. The re-entry package heats up to more than 1000C often. Specialized carbon composites similar to ones in space vehicles are used. 2. I think this photo was more of a time lapse than programmed delivery of warheads at definite spacing. There are videos of MIRV entries which are equally cool. Including one of the impact site, where one can see dummy warheads impacting target zone few seconds apart. (Second video is an animated flight sequence) https://youtu.be/Eh96NdcgE2Y https://youtu.be/Eh96NdcgE2Y https://youtu.be/Mvo54LJcXe8 https://youtu.be/Mvo54LJcXe8 3. Unlikely its radial or linear entirely. The camera perspective makes it look all of them in a line. 4. Terminal guidance is not on each MIRV. But small spin generators stabilize the flight towards target. The warhead bus has onboard computer which releases individual warheads at high velocity once the correct attitude over the target is reached. Terminal flight is unguided ballistics based on calculations prior to release. Needless to say, the warhead bus releases them at a LEO altitude, so by impact they are easily ~10-15 Mach 5. Yes & Yes. US DoD seems very particular on keeping Kwajalein in mostly pristine state. All discernible parts are recovered in the atoll & shallow sea around it. A lot of people from the local population are employed in the upkeep of the facility & maintenance. Usually the impact zone is a very concentrated area. Foreign military access is out of bounds with US Strategic Command presence in the atolls.
- justinator 4y agoIt's hard to imagine that ICBMs are available - and always available, at a moment's notice to be launched when a conventional satellite needs weeks to months to achieve something similar. I can't even imagine how liquid fuel is stored on land, let alone on a submarine.
- United857 4y agoMost ICBMs are solid fueled (at least the US ones)
- sidewndr46 4y agoYeah, the safety record of liquid fueled weapons isn't very good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...
- Eleison23 4y agoInteresting article and story. I don't rightly recall ever hearing about this particular incident. I was 8; so I wonder if/when details were released to the public. You really wonder -- this would be a hugely dangerous incident and very embarrassing for the general public to find out about it, so you'd expect that the military would keep a lid on it, so to speak, for as long as possible. The cat was out of the bag by 1988, because a film was made about the incident, so it says.
- disillusioned 4y agoHighly recommend reading Eric Schlosser's fantastic book Command and Control. It goes into great detail about the failings at the Damascus Incident, but also features some truly hair-raising accounts of other near-catastrophic nuclear near-misses.
- gattr 4y agoSeconded. Add to that the (insane?) early SIOP, a plan for an all-out attack on the USSR with waves of nuke-armed strategic bombers. As for the Damascus accident, I'd love to watch a high-budget movie about it (preferably on the level of "Deepwater Horizon", with Mark Wahlberg to boot).
- walrus01 4y agoFun fact: high precision/high accuracy inertial navigation systems for modern avionics/missile guidance/similar are some of the most sensitive and controlled ITAR items. For when you want your $10 million UAV to successfully navigate in a GPS denied/jammed environment or similar. They also have a number of applications for submarines. Modern INS are considerably smaller than the thing in the photo and implemented from totally different technology. More directly related to the thing in the post: Google "peacekeeper rail garrison". For a while there was a plan to have whole fleets of ICBM-equipped disguised cargo trains that could travel randomly around the US midwest and mountain states. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=peacekeeper+rail+garrison https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=peacekeep...
- Animats 4y ago"There are very few applications requiring such precise guidance and independence from external references. In fact, beyond ICBM guidance, none have been identified." Ballistic missile submarines need very low drift inertial navigation, because they stay submerged for a long time without outside references. The submarines provides a starting position for missiles, so missile error is added to submarine error. Size and weight aren't major issues, so they can use much larger gyros. There's continuing interest in inertial navigation. Projects show up on DARPA.[1] The military assumes that GPS will be jammed much of the time in wartime, so they want inertial backup. [1] https://www.darpa.mil/program/micro-technology-for-positioning-navigation-and-timing https://www.darpa.mil/program/micro-technology-for-positioni...
- rkagerer 4y agoAren't missiles launched from the surface, enabling a quick calibration just before launch? When there aren't clear skies to see stars, what other sort of non-GPS calibration could be done at sea?
- rkagerer 4y agoTIL submarines can fire ballistic missiles while submerged. It helps them maintain stealth. Here's a video from the 60's showing Polaris firings: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1960-07-21_First_Polaris_Firing_By_Submerged_U-Boat.ogv https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1960-07-21_First_Polari...
- cwillu 4y agoAmong others (Tomahawk being notable), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-27_Polaris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-27_Polaris was designed to be launched underwater, in service from 1961.
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- baybal2 4y ago
- mijowi 4y agoThe missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't. In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation, the variation being the difference between where the missile is, and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was. The missile guidance computer scenario works as follows. Because a variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, it is not sure just where it is. However, it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice-versa, and by differentiating this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be, and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error.
- rkagerer 4y agoI know this is from a 90's Air Force video.. but it sounds like he's reading the script straight off a corporate patent application.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoLike someone trying to explain a Kalman filter with zero math.
- kaapipo 4y agohttps://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-missile-knows-where-it-is https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-missile-knows-where-it-is
- psychphysic 4y agoReminds me of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's guide books. Or even something from Red Dwarf.
- rkagerer 4y agoThere's something so satisfying about a fully self-contained inertial guidance system that magically knows where it is to a reasonable degree of accuracy over a long period of time without any external input. Is it true AIRS was the peak of this technology (in terms of drift)? How much TLC did they need in terms of maintenance, and how reliable in practice was that complex system of 19,000 parts?
- KaiserPro 4y ago> There are very few applications requiring such precise guidance and independence from external references. nowadays AR needs something like the same level of precision, but over a longer timeline. Instead of just IMU, AR glasses have the advantage of using SLAM as well as passive wifi to locate as well.
- Steve44 4y agoOn a related note the Museum of Berkshire Aviation [1], about 30 miles west of London, has a Chevaline[2] reentry module. This includes a dummy warhead along with gyroscopes, decoy 'flares', and all the hydrazine pipes and steering systems. It's fascinating to see close up, especially the quality of workmanship on it all. They also have things like a Miles M.52 (1943 supersonic project) and a Fairey Jet Gyrodyne (jet exhaust from the rotor tips). It's a great little museum if you're ever in the area. I've just uploaded some pictures from my visit [3] [1] https://museumofberkshireaviation.co.uk/ https://museumofberkshireaviation.co.uk/ [2] https://museumofberkshireaviation.co.uk/html/exhibits/chevaline.htm https://museumofberkshireaviation.co.uk/html/exhibits/cheval... [3] https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevecargill/52524425464/in/album-72177720303989342/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevecargill/52524425464/in/al...
- contingencies 4y agoNice. You can even read the component names on the PCB at https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52524141291_eb04eebb22_k.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52524141291_eb04eebb22_k...
- heisenbit 4y agoHow does this system perform compared to modern laser/fiber based gyros?
- y04nn 4y agoI don't know, but I think laser gyros have been surpassed by HGR (Hemispherical resonator gyroscope) [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherical_resonator_gyroscope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherical_resonator_gyro...
- bmj 4y agoWhat truly blows my mind: this is technology that is built to be destroyed.
- marvin 4y agoHopefully it's built to be so scary it's never used at all.
- detourdog 4y agoI have been collecting inertial guidance systems since the early days of eBay. Autonetics was spun out of North American Aviation to focus on inertial guidance systems. I'm attracted to them as computing milestones. Autonetics solved the same digital interactive computing problem using the big 3 techniques: Vacuum Tubes Discreet components Integrated circuits. I joined today because I now have so many artifacts that I was considering trying to plan a convention to discuss. If anyone is interested in studying these artifacts. Here is a collection of poor photos of some the artifacts. https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0YG4TcsmGWIVSf https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0YG4TcsmGWIVSf Just this morning I'm looking over some vacuum tube components. Trying to figure out what they are apart of.