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NEW DELHI: A day after the land-attack version of BrahMos failed to perform properly during a test at the Pokhran firing range, defence scientists on Wednesday declared they would test-fire the supersonic cruise missile within a month after rectifying the errors.
“The missile in itself is proven. The test's main objective was to evaluate the new homing scheme for the Army's Block-II missiles to hit a specific small target, with a low radar cross-section, in a multi-target environment,” BrahMos Aerospace chief A Sivathanu Pillai told Times of India.
“The complicated mission called for an advanced algorithm and intelligence embedded in the missile. The problem was in the software, not hardware. We are now revalidating the new software through extensive simulations. We will test the missile again within a month,” he added.
As reported earlier by Times of India, the Army wants to induct the 290-km-range BrahMos missile, which flies at a speed of 2.8 Mach, as “a precision strike weapon”.
It has already placed orders for two BrahMos regiments in the first phase at a cost of Rs 8,352 crore, with 134 missiles, 10 road-mobile autonomous launchers on 12×12 Tatra vehicles, four mobile command posts and the like.
Pakistan, on its part, is inducting its nuclear-capable Babur land-attack cruise missile (LACM), developed with China's help to have a strike range of over 500 km, in large numbers into its arsenal.
Even as India and Russia begin preliminary work on a “hypersonic” BrahMos-2 missile capable of flying at a speed between 5-7 Mach, two Indian Sukhoi-30MKI fighters have also been sent to Russia for integration with BrahMos' air-launched version.
The Navy has already inducted the BrahMos missile's naval version on a couple of its warships and has placed orders worth Rs 711 crore for 49 firing units. The armed forces' eventual plan is to have nuclear-tipped LACMs, with strike ranges in excess of 1,500-km.
