ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF HOMING GUIDANCE LAWS IN THE TERMINAL PHASE OF INTERCEPTION: This thesis proposes methods for design and analysis of a homing guidance loop in the terminal phase of an aerial interception, considering realistic characteristics of elements of the loop, such as nonlinear kinematics, actuator saturation, time-varying tracker etc. The proposed method of stability analysis, carried out for a linear time-varying (LTV) model of the Proportional Navigation Guidance (PNG) loop valid close to the collision triangle, is novel as it considers a time-varying forward path. Stability of the line-of-sight (LOS) rate has been analyzed utilizing a generalization of the Popov criterion and found to give accurate bound of its instability. However, the assumptions leading to the LTV model of the PNG loop do not hold in the terminal phase for targets with high velocity or large maneuver. The maximum allowable bound of the seeker/estimator time constant has been quanti¯ed from the condition of stability of a linearized PNG loop. Such a desired speci¯cation of the tracker would be of help to both the guidance and tracker designers. The region of attraction of the nonlinear kinematics of the ideal PNG loop has been derived around the equilibrium point, which gives the capture region for the PNG law.