Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM): A Cruise Missile Guidance Aid
| Author | Joe P. Golden (Joint Cruise Missiles Project Office) |
|---|---|
| Published | 1980 |
| Format | Research paper |
TL;DR — A 1980 SPIE conference paper from the US Joint Cruise Missiles Project Office giving a short history and overview of TERCOM, the terrain-matching aid to cruise missile navigation.
Published in SPIE Vol. 238, Image Processing for Missile Guidance (1980). Golden, writing from the Navy/Air Force Joint Cruise Missiles Project Office in Washington, explains that the cruise missile is guided by an inertial system that is periodically corrected by terrain contour matching, a terrain-correlation idea first proposed by Chance-Vought in the late 1950s.
The paper is organised as a brief history of TERCOM’s development, a general description of the concept (comparing a measured strip of terrain elevation against reference maps stored in the missile’s computer), and a snapshot of its status and planned developments as of 1980. It is a period overview from the program office, not a technical specification.
What it is: a short, unclassified conference paper by a government program office — a primary source on Cold War guidance technology. The scan is a CVISION OCR copy; its origin online was not traced.
Where this came from
- A copy saved in October 2026.
9 pages. A PDF copy is held in Kyle’s private archive; it is not linked or shared here.