Calculating Reaction Time to Intercept a Missile

by Gabriel Perez

Submitted : Spring 2013

We have men and women stationed all over the world monitoring the skies to make sure there are no immediate dangers such as incoming missiles. However, when a missile is spotted, Engineers get together to decide what the incoming missile is, what missile to use in order to intercept it and how much time do we have before it passes the boarder of the critical height. In order to answer these questions correctly, Engineers would have to take some time to make sure there is no errors, in a situation where this is a limited amount of time already.

In this research you will see that I have created a computer program that is able to calculate the time frame that the missile needs to be intercepted before it reaches critical height. The calculation the program uses will be a mixture of calculus and physics. It takes into account the different forces an incoming missile would face while also using the two dimension kinematics formulas.

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