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The test saw the land-attack variant of the BrahMos being fired from an Army's transporter erector launcher (TEL) – known as a ‘mobile autonomous launcher’ (MAL), and during the trial, the precision strike weapon and seeker traversed the course in the designated trajectory and accurately hit the set target
Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL), Hyderabad has bagged another success with the Seeker system used in the BrahMos Supersonic Missile, which was successfully test fired at the Pokhran test range in Rajasthan on Thursday.
It was for the first time that the missile, capable of travelling at speeds of up to Mach 3.0 and hit enemy targets at a range of up to 400 km was tested with indigenously developed 'seeker' technology.
The Seeker system, indigenously developed was a key contributor to increasing the effectiveness of the precision strike of BrahMos missile. The ECIL had collaborated with the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL) and BrahMos Aerospace, to develop the Seeker system.
Brahmos is a two-stage missile system, which comprises a solid propellant booster engine that brings the missile to supersonic speed and then gets separated, and a liquid ramjet that takes it closer to 3 Mach cruising speed. With a flight range of up to 290 km, the missile has a cruising altitude of up to 15 km and terminal altitude as low as 10m.
The range of the system can be extended up to 400km with some technical restrictions removed after India became a member of the Missile Technology Control Regime last year, reported Press Trust of India.
Equipped with a conventional warhead weighing between 200 kg and 300 kg, the Brahmos supersonic cruise missile operates on a ‘fire-and-forget principle’.
The current flight test was conducted three months after the missile was successfully test fired for the first time from the frontline Sukhoi-30 MKI combat jet operated by the Indian Air Force.
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