Bhubaneswar: Indian Army on Wednesday successfully conducted a night test of indigenously developed Prithvi-II, a short-range ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warhead, from a defence test facility off Odisha coast.
According to reports, the surface-to-surface missile was mounted on a Mobile Tatra transporter-erector Launcher (MTL) and test fired from the launching complex III (LC-III) of the Integrated Test Range (ITR) at about 7.30 pm. Equipped with a state of the art guidance system the missile was fired in a real-time in full operational configurations.
The night trial of Prithvi assumes significance as the missiles fired in the dark are difficult to be tracked and shot down. Prithvi-II, capable of attacking targets at a range of 350 km, is India’s first developed and inducted indigenous surface-to-surface strategic missile, sources said.
Guided by an inertial navigation system and controlled by the thrust vector control and aero-dynamic control systems, the missile reached the target in the Bay of Bengal with a very high accuracy of better than 10 meters.
The 9 metre long missile with a diameter of one metre has the capability of carrying one tonne warhead. The missile thrusted by liquid propulsion twin engine uses an inertial guidance system while the warhead uses a radar correlation terminal guidance system, the sources said.
The missile, developed by Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), was inducted into the Armed Forces in 2003 and is into series of production since then.
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