The Indian Navy has already deployed the Indo-Russian BrahMos supersonic cruise missile on the INS Rajput, P Venugopal, director, Defence Research and Development Laboratories (DRDL) and head of the BrahMos mission told a packed audience at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Powai, Mumbai, which is holding the aerospace meet Zephyr 2007.

INS Ranjit is next in line among the eight warships that the Indian Navy has planned to equip with this missile. Each ship will be fitted with four missile launchers, two on each side of the vessel. The Indian Army has already inducted its first group of truck-launched missiles.

He said BrahMos was just one of the 10 missiles that DRDL''s missile group has produced or is working on. The cruise missile has high accuracy and low observability, he said, and showed several exciting film clips on the tests the missile has been subjected to during induction trials. The missile has already gone through 14 trials, all of which have been successful.

BrahMos has two variants for specific targets, and four platform variants, he disclosed. There is an anti-ship version and an anti-land-based targets version. As far as launching is concerned, the missile can be launched from a mobile land-based vehicle (truck or train), from a ship, from a submarine or from an aircraft. While the first two launch platforms have already been deployed, the submarine-launched system is yet to be tested, while the air-launched version is still under development.

The four-tonne rocket has a diameter of 70 cm and is 8 metres long. It has a maximum range of 300km and a payload of 500kg. Both the latter are the maximum limits mandated by the international missile control regime, he said, hinting that they could have achieved higher parameters in these two areas had it not been for the limits.

The missile can fly from a sea-skimming height of just 10 metres above the waves to an altitude of 15km. While it can achieve a maximum velocity of Mach 2 in the denser air at sea level, this goes up to Mach 2.7 in the rarefied upper atmosphere above 7 km, he said.

The missile has three propulsion systems. First, a gas generator blows it out of its canister, then a solid fuel booster speeds it up to Mach 2, after which an air-breathing liquid fuel ramjet takes over to propel it to its target.

Thanks to an onboard inertial navigation system with three gyroscopes and three accelerometers, it is a "fire and forget" weapon, requiring no further guidance from the control centre once the target has been assigned and it is launched. Once assembled, it has a 10-year shelf life, requiring a routine preventive maintenance check once every three years.

The missile can be launched at any angle, from horizontal to vertical, and is extremely destructive. Two types of warheads can be deployed - while one explodes on contact, the other penetrates the target by impact and then explodes a few milliseconds later. Anti-jamming systems onboard protect it from electronic countermeasures as well as enable it to distinguish between the target and decoys like chaff screens.

The missiles can be fired in waves. Each truck carries three missile canisters, a generator and a control centre. The three missiles can be fired just 5 seconds after one another, and each can be independently targeted. For sea-based targets like ships, an airborne surveillance system like an aircraft, a helicopter or an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is required to relay the coordinates of the target to the control centre.

The missile has been developed with active private sector cooperation. While Godrej Aerospace produces the airframe, wings, as well as the pneumatic and hydraulic systems, Larsen and Toubro (L&T) makes the composites and Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) makes the inertial navigation system and missile checkout system.

The air-launched version, still under development, will be deployed on the Sukhoi Su-30 fighter-bomber. When launched from an aircraft, the missile does not need a canister, Venugopal said. The aircraft releases the missile, and the solid booster ignites as soon as it is about 100 metres away from the plane.

An accompanying film showed how the Navy fired the missile from the INS Rajput at its intended target, a decommissioned ship, which broke into two on explosion, and then sank within four minutes. The test of the land-based target showed that the missile hit within one to two metres from the target''s epicentre, at a range of 55 km. The test was conducted in cyclonic wind conditions, confirming the weapon''s robustness, he said.

But as if that is not enough, Venugopal said further refinements are in the pipeline. This includes a GPS receiver that will enable the control centre to make minute adjustments during flight, to achieve pinpoint accuracy. A new seeker system, called SCAN, will help achieve this by giving the control centre a visual image of the target, enabling the control team to home it in on a particular part of the target.