The North Korean Hwasong-12 test of 14 September: georeferencing Kim Jong Un's map

(This post has been a while in the making. Due to various reasons, including the 21 Sept fireball, I did not come to write it up on this blog until now. The same analysis however was earlier presented as a Twitter-thread, on 23 September)

"I love the smell of UDMH in the morning..." (photo: KCNA)

Over the past months, I have spent a number of posts on North Korea's recent increasingly bold missile tests. The latest of these tests happened on September 14 (local September 15 in North Korea). At 21:57 UT that day, North Korea launched a Hwasong-12 IRBM from Pyongyang Sunan airfield towards the east-northeast. It crossed over Japan (causing air-raid alarms to go off) with, according to western military sources, a range of ~3700 km and apogee at 770 km, before impacting in the Pacific Ocean. The test was the second one to launch the Hwasong in a 'regular' rather than 'lofted' trajectory, over Japan.

I was abroad at the time of the test,  meaning it was several days before I could look at this test and start an analysis. Some results were earlier presented on 23 September as a Twitter-thread.

photo: KCNA

As part of the propaganda photographs published by KCNA following the test, there was (just like after the test of 29 August) a picture of Kim Jong Un sitting behind a desk, with a map in front of him. As was the case for August 29, the map shows a missile trajectory, presumably the trajectory aimed for in this test:

photo: KCNA

I obtained a high resolution version of this photograph for analysis with the much appreciated help of Ankit Panda. First, I roughly squared this image using the skew-tools in Photoshop:

Next, I georeferenced this image against an actual map using QGIS. The resulting map is the one below (the map projection I have used is a Lambert azimuthal equal area projection centered on Sunan. The grid is WGS84). :

click map to enlarge

The result of this georefencing is that the drawn trajectory starting at Sunan ends at approximately 39.60 N, 168.05 E. The range from Sunan to this impact location is 3615 km.

Note that I have added, in yellow, country outlines to the map to show the validity of the georeferencing. I also added a few annotations. I have added an STK-modelled ballistic trajectory to the map as a dashed red line: it is highly similar to the original trajectory line drawn on the map, as you can see, with apogee position corresponding to what appears to be a text in red on the map: what was depicted on Kim Jong Un's map hence appears to be a real ballistic trajectory.

The resulting range of 3615 km is close enough to the range reported by Western military sources (about 3700 km) to conclude that the 14 September test went much as intended.

This is a difference with the 29 August test. In that case, the map showed a ~3300 km range while western military sources said the actual range flown was ~2700 km: it also flew more north than the trajectory that was depicted on the 29 August map. See my earlier blog post here. The match for the 14 September test might indicate that the 29 August test perhaps did not go as intended.

The map below shows both trajectories: that of 29 August as depicted on Kim Jong Un's map (i.e. not the actually flown trajectory!), and that of 14 September as depicted on Kim Jong Un's map:

click map to enlarge (map by author)

It is interesting to look at the range distances for both tests. The range distances of 3316 km and 3615 km ring a bell. The distance from Pyongyang Sunan (the launch location) to Henderson AFB on Guam is ~3415 km. The August 29 map trajectory falls almost exactly 100 km short of that range, while the September 14 trajectory almost exactly 200 km overshoots this range.

I am going back-and-forth on whether this is significant or not. I tend to think that all these kind of map images released are intentional propaganda meant to convey a message: the map is meant to be analysed and "read" by the West.

As an illustration of how it potentially could be read: would we change the launch directions so that they would be towards Guam, then this (the two black crosses) would be the result in terms of the pattern of impact locations relative to Guam:

Remember that North Korea has "threathened" to conduct a quadruple demonstration with four missiles impacting in international waters in an 'envelope' around Guam, if the Trump administration does not stop B1 bomber demonstration flights from Guam. Do we see some kind of test mock enactment for this here? Is the message: "We are already practising for this, imperialist barking dottard dog!".

It would become very interesting if North Korea were to launche two other missiles the coming month, and the pattern where they (were implied to) land relative to the earlier two tests might be very interesting.

photo: KCNA

(I thank Ankit Panda for his help with obtaining a high resolution version of the photograph with Kim Jong Un and the map)

The other subliminal message in Kim Jong Un's missile test map

image: KCNA

The image above (from North Korea's KCNA) shows the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and a map. It was likely taken on the day of the 29 August missile test that shot a Hwasong-12 MRBM over Japan, into the Pacific Ocean. I analyzed this map and what it shows in detail in my previous post, showing that the trajectory which seems to be sketched on the map deviates from the real missile flight path.

But there is more to this map, it turns out after further analysis. There are not one, but two subliminal messages contained in this map.

The first subliminal message, already discussed at the end of my previous post, is that it depicts a 3300 km trajectory (the real flight trajectory appears to have been shorter, 2700 km). This is the approximate distance to Guam.

But there is a second subliminal message. The map also contains a veiled threath to Hawaii.

click to enlarge

As can be seen in the annotated georeferenced version of the map image above (see also my previous post), the trajectory skeched on the map (white) is very close in direction to what a trajectory towards Hawaii would be.

In the map above, there are two lines representing such a trajectory targetting Hawaii:

- The green dashed line shows what a real, 7400 km range trajectory towards Pearl Harbour would be (this takes earth curvature and earth rotation into account);

- The yellow dashed line shows what the trajectory is if launched into the same azimuth as for  targetting Pearl Harbour, but with a shorter 3300 km range, as on the map in front of Kim Jong Un.

The latter yellow line obviously is very close to what is sketched on Kim Jong Un's map. In fact, I think that within the error margins of my georeferencing effort, they might well be the same.

The white line, my best effort to represent the trajectory sketched on the map, would be a missile launched into azimuth ~77.25 degrees. The dashed yellow and green lines, are both for missiles fired into azimuth ~76.9 degrees. 76.9 and 77.25 degrees are very close, a difference of only ~0.35 degrees.

To clarify further what the map depicts: the reason that, even though the launch azimuth is the same, the green and yellow lines do not overlap is because of earth rotation and earth curvature. Firing a missile into the same azimuth (~76.9 degrees) from Pyongyang Sunan, yields a slightly more southern trajectory if the range of the missile is ~3300 km (as on Kim Jong Un's map) instead of ~7400 km (the distance to Pearl Harbour). This is because a flight to Pearl Harbour takes longer in time, and the earth surface is meanwhile rotating under the flight path.

So the trajectory sketched on the map contains two subliminal messages: the length (~3300 km) is roughly the distance to Guam. The launch direction is the launch direction towards Pearl Harbour. Two veiled threaths in one. No wonder Kim Jong Un smiles so exuberantly: "Riddle this, you Imperialist agressor Puppets!".

I firmly believe that the North Korean propaganda machine deliberately includes these images into what it makes public. When they show a map or monitor with a trajectory, however oblique and vague, it is not unintentional but (I firmly believe) intentional.

(this post is a follow-on to my earlier analysis here)

North Korea's 29 August Hwasong-12 test with Japan fly-over: did it go as planned?

image: KCNA

It are hectic times for those (like this author) interested in the North Korean rocketry program. The past months have seen a steady series of increasingly bold missile tests (along with a threath of test-firing missiles towards Guam), that have been the subject of three earlier posts on this blog the past months.

And now a new one has occurred, and it is perhaps the boldest of these test flights so far. Last Thursday, 29 August 2017, at 20:57 UT, North Korea launched a Hwasong-12 MRBM on a trajectory over Japan: a politically bold move that caused air-raid sirens to go off in Northern Japan.

images: KCNA

Western military sources say that the missile was fired from Pyongyang Sunan airfield. It reportedly travelled 2700 km, crossing over Hokkaido, coming down in the Pacific Ocean about 1180 km from Cape Erimo in southeast Hokkaido, Japan. Apogee of the trajectory is quoted as 550 km.

This allows us to produce the trajectory reconstruction below (with some leeway as the quoted ranges are probably balpark figures). It shows that the missile crossed Japan over the southern tip of Hokkaido, a trajectory that seems designed to minimize Japanese landmass overflown, mitigating risk levels. The two red circles on the second map are depicting a 2700 km range around Pyongyang Sunan and 1180 km range around Cape Erimo. Where they are closest, is the resulting impact point (near 41.92 N, 157.56 E). Using STK I get a flight-time of ~14 minutes.

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

That odd-looking second of the two maps above is based on an interesting photograph published by the North Korean State News Agency KCNA. It shows an exuberant Kim Jong Un sitting on a desk with a map in front of him:

image: KCNA

We have recently seen more of this kind of shots from KCNA published after previous tests, and they often yield interesting information. In this case, the interesting detail is that a trajectory appears to be depicted on the map, as a thin line (the arc above it ending at the same point likely is a 3D representation):



If the sketched line indeed is the intended trajectory, then the interesting point of it is that it does not match the observed trajectory according to Western military sources.

I used my GIS skills to georeference the map on the image (with QGIS). Like in the case of the 'Guam map', the low resolution of the image and very oblique angle of te map on it make this a challenge, and the georeferencing obviously is not perfect - but good enough for some conclusions. This is the result (look for the vague line that possibly represents a trajectory on the image):

click to enlarge

Here is the same map but with annotations added, and with the trajectory sketched on the map (white line) and the actual observed trajectory (black dashed line):

click to enlarge

It is immediately obvious that the two trajectories do not match well. The trajectory (if it is one) sketched on the Kim Jong Un map is located more to the south, and indicates a larger range, about 3300 km (interestingly, it does conform to a real ballistic trajectory with earth rotation and curvature taken into account, unlike the straight line drawn on the infamous "Guam map").

(the second map shows exactly the same map area, but with a DEM and country shapefile as background. It shows you how the topography matches that on the georectified map from the photograph)

The difference between the two trajectories amounts to a range difference of 600 km and a 45 km difference in apogee. It represents a difference in launch azimuth of 6 degrees and of 3.7 degrees in launch elevation. It points to an underperformance of around 0.4 km/s in the missile's burnout speed.

click to enlarge

It is interesting to note that while North Korea for some previous tests (and their proposed Guam shot) published very accurate figures for range, flight time and apogee, they did not do that this time. It is also interesting to note that some Western military sources report that the missile "broke into three pieces".

So there are multiple indications that the test did perhaps not go entirely as planned, with an underperformance of the rocket engine and an error in launch direction, and perhaps structural failure. This would imply that the targetting of the Hwasong-12 is not quite fail-safe yet, which has implications for Kim Jong Un's proposed Guam enveloping missile demonstration.

This was the first test of the Hwasong-12 on a "normal" trajectory and it shows why it is important for North Korea to test its missiles on such a normal operational, rather than a 'lofted' trajectory: it is a different regime of stress on the missile and has the engines perform under more realistic conditions than on a 'lofted' trajectory. Errors in targetting and missile performance become more apparent.

For North Korea to do such tests on a "normal" trajectory for its MRBM's and ICBM's, they have to fly it over Japan. We are going to see more of this kind of tests the coming months is my prediction.


Update 31 Aug 2017:

(1) The 38 North blog has an interesting post suggesting the possible failure of a post-boost vehicle.
(2) South Korean and US military analysts appear to come to the same analytical conclusions as I did, according to this Korean news bulletin. 
(3) As Ankit Panda rightfully remarked, the situation drawn on Kim Jong Un's map need not comply to reality. It could be merely meant as a propaganda message (3300 km is roughly the distance from the launch site to Guam).

Update 1 Sep 2017:

A further follow-on post is here, discussing how the map contains two veiled threaths, to Guam and to Pearl Harbour.