Hypersonic Missiles

http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/ind...sonic_missiles

India: Tinkering With Hypersonic Missiles
May 14, 2008 | 1918 GMT


A new hypersonic version of the BrahMos supersonic cruise and anti-ship missile capable of speeds in excess of Mach 5 is reportedly undergoing laboratory testing. Though the challenges to its development cannot be overstated, its progress bears continued monitoring.


Laboratory testing of a new hypersonic version of a BrahMos supersonic cruise and anti-ship missile capable of speeds in excess of Mach 5 is now reportedly undergoing laboratory testing, BrahMos Aerospace CEO and Managing Director A. Sivathanu Pillai said May 13.

While many challenges remain — challenges that cannot be overstated — such a missile would be a noteworthy addition to the threat environment on the world’s oceans — especially near the busiest sea-lane, the Strait of Malacca. And just who, besides India, might buy such a weapon remains an open question.

Taking its name from a juxtaposition of India’s Brahmaputra River and Russia’s Moscow River, BrahMos Aerospace Private Ltd.began as a joint Indian-Russian venture in 1998. The current missile now in production was based heavily on the Soviet Union’s SS-N-26 design. The design is intended to be versatile, capable of being launched from land, surface warships, submarines and aircraft against both ships and targets ashore. It is to be deployed within all three branches of the Indian military.

Though little is known about this new hypersonic variant undergoing laboratory testing, it reportedly will use a scramjet instead of a ramjet in the second stage of the same basic design. The pace at which this new development follows serial production of the current BrahMos design suggests the Indians are simply attempting to stretch the existing weapon architecture. While this expansion is likely within the parameters of the design, very significant challenges remain.

As an object proceeds significantly beyond the speed of sound, the friction of air against its surfaces begins to create problems with heat. For example, the SR-71 Blackbird — a now-retired U.S. aircraft capable of exceeding Mach 3 — was known to experience expansion of its titanium structure as well as effects to its surfaces. But the heat at such supersonic speeds has been managed by many countries for decades in both aircraft and missile manufacture.

By moving beyond Mach 5, BrahMos engineers are beginning to flirt with territory where advanced materials science and composites will be necessary. This is especially true if the missile is intended to sustain its speeds at low levels, where the air is much more dense (and thus the friction much greater). Nor is the current BrahMos design thought to have particularly advanced guidance or maneuverability, suggesting potential weaknesses in its operational utility against modern air defenses.

Ultimately, it is not at all clear that BrahMos’ own internal hypersonic lab testing will result in a weapon. The lifetime of Indian weapons programs from inauguration to deployment sometimes is measured in decades, and fielding a hypersonic anti-ship and cruise missile is nothing if not ambitious. Indian engineers do not have experience with hypersonics. And questions remain not only about guidance and maneuverability but regarding flight profile and operational speed at low altitudes. These are questions that go to the heart of the potential missile’s operational effectiveness, to say nothing of price, which will impact both domestic acquisition and foreign sales.

Nevertheless, the objective is noteworthy. The vaunted Soviet SS-N-19 “Shipwreck” and SS-N-22 “Sunburn” anti-ship missiles are both capable of supersonic flight below Mach 3; such speeds both reduce defensive reaction time and dramatically increase kinetic destructiveness. Should BrahMos succeed, further reducing reaction times and increasing kinetic destructiveness, its hypersonic missile could be deployed operationally. That would indeed be an accomplishment for India’s defense industry, even with the help of Russian engineers.

The missile would not shift the military balance between New Delhi and Islamabad — where Pakistan’s comparative disadvantage will remain — or between New Delhi and Beijing — where India’s disadvantage will remain. But the operational deployment of hypersonic anti-ship missiles by the Indian navy and potential export customers like Malaysia and Indonesia would certainly signify a shift in the threat environment around the waters of the world’s busiest sea-lane, the Strait of Malacca.

Hypersonic BrahMos Cruise Missile Tested Successfully

Daily News & Updates
India Defence Premium
Dated 13/5/2008


India's showpiece supersonic cruise missile, the BrahMos, has now been successfully tested in a hypersonic version, though under laboratory conditions, according to BrahMos Aerospace chief executive officer, Dr A Sivathanu Pillai.

''We have achieved a speed of Mach 5.26 in our laboratory tests of the hypersonic version of the BrahMos. However, it will take some 15-20 tests under controlled conditions before the missile can be actually test-launched,'' Dr Pillai said. The test was conducted at the Hyderabad-based Advanced Systems Laboratory of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) which has developed the missile through a joint venture with Russia's NPO organisation.

The BrahMos missile is currently available in a tri-sonic form (Mach 2.86) and can be described as belonging to the high supersonic class, which describes missiles in the Mach 3-4 category. Hypersonic missiles fly at speeds over Mach 5. According to Dr Pillai, the Brahmos hypersonic version will not only have higher speed, but will also consume less fuel and require less operational time to deploy. These qualities are expected to provide the missile longer range, and also ensure less reaction time from the enemy.

High speeds also make the missile difficult to detect, and increase the kinetic impact on the target. The velocity of the missile is directly proportional to the destruction it causes, with higher velocities causing higher damage, Dr Pillai elaborated. Dr Pillai also said the hypersonic version was powered by a scramjet engine that is also used for launching satellites at low cost.

http://news.in.msn.com/national/arti...mentid=1868668


Brahmos hypersonic missile to be ready by 2013: DRDO

Chennai: Brahmos Aerospace was working on hypersonic missile project, Brahmos II, and it was expected to be ready by 2013, a top defence official said Saturday.

"Once developed, the Missile would have a speed between Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound) and Mach 7", Chief Controller of Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO), A Sivathanu Pillai, told reporters on the sidelines of the inauguration of an exhibition of armoured vehicles by Combat Vehicles Research and Development Establishment (CVRDE), organised as part of the DRDO Golden Jubilee celebrations.

Pillai, also the CMD of Brahmos, said the future wars would be fought with minimum people using high-powered weapons.

"It will be a network centric and fought with intelligent and autonomous systems", he said, adding cyber warfare and robotic systems would dominate the battlefield.

Later in the presence of Sivathanu Pillai, an MoU was signed between CVRDE and Anna University to develop various combat vehicles for future defence purpose.

The MoU would facilitate students of the University gain access to high technology labs of CVRDE at Avadi, Outstanding Director of CVRDE, S Sundaresh later said.

A mach 5 (and that's a cruise missile) with a range of 300 KM should be a damn swift missile and should be able to evade any missile based defense counter measure on most situation.

Even a simple subsonic cruise missile like the Tomahawk can evade most missile defence systems as it is difficult to get it on a radar to shoot it down... and, this one is hypersonic as well... It ought to be DEADLY

India, Russia plan new air-launched cruise missile - UPI.com

India, Russia plan new air-launched cruise missile

WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 (UPI) -- Flush with success on developing an air-launched supersonic cruise missile -- ALCM -- together, Russia and India have agreed to produce a more ambitious hypersonic one.

Sivathanu Pillai, chief executive officer of the Russian-Indian BrahMos Aerospace joint venture, announced the project in New Delhi on Sept. 29.

"Today, at a meeting of the Russian-Indian intergovernmental commission on military-technical cooperation, we decided to set up a working group on the development of the BrahMos-2 missile," Pillai said, RIA Novosti reported.

"The new hypersonic missile will have a top speed of over Mach 5, which would make it impossible to intercept," he said.

BrahMos was created by the Russian and Indian governments in 1998. RIA Novosti said sea- and land-based versions of its Mach-2.8 supersonic cruise missile already had been successfully developed and operationally deployed by the Indian army and navy.

Pillai said BrahMos had completed work on its air-launched cruise missile and the Indian air force already had elected the Russian-built Sukhoi Su-30 MKI Flanker-H multirole fighter as its launching aircraft.

RIA Novosti said the BrahMos cruise missile could fly 180 miles with a 660-pound warhead and could fly as low as 30 feet above the ground, making it exceptionally difficult to track and lock on radar or to shoot down. The BrahMos-2 can fly three times as fast as the subsonic U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile.

According to the report, Pillai said the company was going to be able to boost its annual production of cruise missiles to 50 a year, thanks to its recent purchase of an assembly factory in India's Kerala state from Kerala Hitech Industries Ltd. The company's main plant is located in the high-tech city of Hyderabad in southern India.

RIA Novosti said eventually the Indian government might buy as many as 1,000 cruise missiles from BrahMos for its own armed forces and sell 2,000 more to other countries around the world.

Missile success

T.S. SUBRAMANIAN

http://www.flonnet.com/stories/20090102252609400.htm

After the flawless launch of the surface-to-surface missile Shourya, the DRDO is set to fire an interceptor missile.





MOHAMMED YOUSUF

V.K. Saraswat (left), Chief Controller, Research and Development, Missile and Strategic Systems, with the Shourya team led by its programme director A.K. Chakrabarti (right) and P. Venugopalan, DRDL Director. In the backdrop is the missile in a canister.

BUOYED by the successful first test of the surface-to-surface Shourya missile from the Integrated Test Range at Chandipur-on-sea near Balasore in Orissa on November 12, missile technologists of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) are engaged in preparing for the launch of an interceptor missile. The launch, scheduled to take place in the second half of December, will feature two missiles. While the target missile, with a range of 1,500 km, will be fired from a ship in the Bay of Bengal towards Wheeler Island, located off the Orissa coast, the interceptor missile, which will be fired from the island, will engage an incoming “enemy missile” in the terminal phase of its flight at an altitude of 80 km in the exo-atmosphere and pulverise it. The enemy missile will be a modified version of Dhanush.

There is intense high-technology work going on at the Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL), the Advanced Systems Laboratory (ASL), and the Research Centre, Imarat (RCI), all located on the serene DRDO campus. The scientists at the ASL are furiously working on Agni-V, which will have a range of 5,000 km. Its design has been completed and development work is under way. It will be launched in 2010. The ASL is also preparing for a flight trial of Agni-IIIA in 2009. The missile will be an advanced version of Agni-II, which has a range of more than 2,500 km.

Shourya is a hypersonic missile; it can reach a velocity of Mach 6 (six times the speed of sound) even at low altitudes. On November 12, even before this “totally new” missile crossed a distance of 300 km, it reached a velocity of Mach 5, heating up its surface to 700{+0} Celsius. The missile performed an ingenuous manoeuvre of rolling to spread the heat uniformly on its surface. Its high manoeuvrability makes it less vulnerable to present-day anti-missile defence systems.

Shourya can reach targets 700 km away, carrying both conventional and nuclear warheads. It is 10 metres long and 74 cm in diameter and weighs 6.2 tonnes. It is a two-stage missile and both its stages are powered by solid propellants. Its flight time is 500 seconds to 700 seconds.

In the estimate of V.K. Saraswat, Chief Controller, Missiles and Strategic Systems, DRDO, Shourya “will rank among the top 10 missiles in the world” in its class, with its high-performance navigation and guidance systems, efficient propulsion systems, state-of-the-art control technologies and canisterised launch. It can be easily transported by road. The missile, encased in a canister, is mounted on a single vehicle, which has only a driver’s cabin, and the vehicle itself is the launch platform. This “single vehicle solution” reduces its signature – it cannot be easily detected by satellites – and makes its deployment easy.

Shourya was ejected from the canister by a gas generator, developed by the High Energy Materials Research Laboratory (HEMRL), Pune, and the ASL. The gas generator, located at the bottom of the canister, fires for about a second and a half. It produces high pressure gas, which expands and ejects the missile from the tube. The missile has six motors; the first one is the motor in the gas generator.The centrepiece of a host of new technologies incorporated in Shourya is its ring-laser gyroscope and accelerometer. The ring-laser gyroscope, a sophisticated navigation and guidance system made by the RCI, is highly classified technology. Advanced countries have denied this technology to India. In Shourya’s flight, it functioned exceptionally well. Its job is to monitor the missile’s position in space when it is flying. The missile’s onboard computer will use this information on the missile’s actual position to compare it with the desired position. Based on the difference between the missile’s actual and desired positions, the computer will decide on the optimum path and actuators will command the missile to fly in its desired/targeted position.

If one were to strike a comparison, the missile is akin to a human body, with the gyroscope acting like the eyes, the computer like the brain and the actuators like the hands.

M. Natarajan, Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister and Director-General of the DRDO, praised the way the ring-laser gyroscope functioned in Shourya’s flight. “We flew our own navigation system in this missile. It worked very well. This is an important step forward for the country in the navigation of missiles, aircraft and spacecraft. No other country will provide India this navigation system,” he said.

Another important feature of the missile is that it has a trajectory that is non-ballistic. This gives Shourya a big advantage in a combat environment of interception by a ballistic missile defence shield. Saraswat said: “There are many features in this missile that reduce its radar cross-section to very low values, ensuring that under no phase of its trajectory, Shourya can be detected by state-of-the-art radars. In strategic defence scenario, this missile will find an important place after it completes its development trials.”

What has focussed attention on Shourya is that it is a land variant of the DRDO’s K-15 missile launched from under water. There have been several launches of the K-15 missile, coming under the Sagarika project. The last of these took place in February 2008 from a submerged pontoon. The launch simulated the conditions of a submarine. W. Selvamurthy, Chief Controller (R&D), DRDO, asserted that the missile provided India with a second strike capability. Selvamurthy called Shourya’s flight a significant milestone in building capability for the nation in the field of missiles for both strategic and tactical applications.

A.K. Chakrabarti, programme director of the Shourya project, said the missile had several “safety interlocks” preventing it from being fired inadvertently. He said strategic missiles (that is, missiles that can carry nuclear warheads, which are used only for a show of threat) had redundancy and reliability built into them so that they were not fired accidentally. Safety interlocks provided such redundancy.

Although hypersonic missiles fly at high altitudes, what makes Shourya different is that it can fly at low altitudes. For instance, Agni variants flew at 100 km, 200 km or 500 km altitudes, reaching even Mach 15. “But Shourya flies at a relatively low altitude, even reaching Mach 6. This is the crux of the matter in terms of technology development,” Saraswat said.

Chakrabarti added: “Hypersonic missile is a new field of activity even in advanced countries. However, we have established our expertise in this field.”

CANISTERISED FORM


BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

Shourya lifts off from the Integrated Test Range at Balasore on November 12.

Shourya’s launch was in a canisterised form but from a silo. Half of the missile’s length was inside a pit, that is, a silo. Chakrabarti said: “You can easily put the entire missile inside the pit. Normally, the depth of the silo depends on the operation. So the depth can be 10 metres or 20 metres, depending on the place where you are going to launch it from, the condition of the ground, or safety requirements.”

Whether the missile was launched from a depth of 20 m or 40 m did not make a difference, P. Venugopalan, Director, DRDL, said. The silo had to be built accordingly. “The missile comes out of it as part of its trajectory. You must fire the main booster only after it comes out of the silo.” A tremendous amount of effort went into the design, quality assurance, and the manufacture and testing of hardware. “For a large system, you cannot afford to conduct many tests. In a few trials, you have to prove the system. Shourya has a high order of reliability,” he said.

What lends mobility to Shourya is that it can be launched from a canister mounted on a trailer. This trailer, or launcher, as it is called, was built by the Research and Development Establishment (Engineers), Pune. It has several features to absorb shocks in order to make the transport of the missile by road safe.

Chakrabarti said the canister was made of locally available high-strength, special-glass composite. The DRDO has set up a facility in the missile complex to manufacture the tube.

Dr. A. Subhananda Rao, Director, HEMRL, said: “This gas generator system should have a very high reliability of 99.997 per cent. If it fails, a lot of things will burst.” The gas generator’s propellants have a special requirement. Their burn rate should be very high, that is, three to four times more than that of the rocket’s propellants. The responsibility of the generator is to produce the gases at the required pressure so that the missile comes out of the canister within a certain velocity band. “The basic requirement is that the missile should come out of the canister within a few seconds. This is to meet the required canister-exit velocity,” Subhananda Rao said.

The first stage is fired by a motor powered by solid propellants, which has a complex grain configuration. The second stage is fired by another motor, which will take the missile to the required velocity. There are retro-motors as well. “When the first stage is separated from the second stage, it has to be decelerated to maintain the gap between the first and second stages. For separating the first stage and jettisoning it, we have pitch-and-yaw motors,” he added.

The HEMRL provides the solid propellants for powering Shourya’s various motors and the pyro devices for jettisoning the first stage. There are elaborate facilities at the 850-acre (one acre is 0.4 hectare) HEMRL complex to design and produce the solid propellants required for various missiles.

The secret of Shourya’s success, in the estimate of M.S.R. Prasad, project director, lies in its optimum configuration. The smaller the size of the missile, the lower its drag and resistance. So its packing density would be high. “Shourya has minimum weight and minimum cross-section. That gives it a high performance,” Prasad explained. If the missile’s diameter were to be large, it could be comfortable internally. But such a diameter would increase the air resistance and decrease the overall performance.

It was a young DRDO team, under the leadership of A. Joseph, project director, that built the missile. While the project team was from the DRDL, which designed Shourya, important contributions came from the ASL, the RCI, the HEMRL and the RDE (Engineers). The missile is under production by Bharat Dynamics Limited, Hyderabad.

the problem with the hypersonic missile is that the flight path cannot be altered mid-flight,but in a supersonic missile and a subsonic one the flight path can be altered midway to hit the target or employ the target designator finder as incase of the new brahmos test.so i think the supersonic brahmos is also a capable weapon but the hypersonic one has the speed advantage, less time to adjust

The missile would be a fire and forget missile like brahmos and used for high level targets, communications, air bases, etc.... this is true invincible but it also means the enemy is as good as dead once fired.

Any idea which is the fastest cruise missile in the world ?

Don't know about that...
If a missile goes hyper-sonic, then technically it should be less maneuverable and more vulnerable to counter-measures.
But if we manage to move past this major problem, then it can pack quite a punch.

^^Most likely it is Brahmos

Ummm.... I am speaking in the context of hyper-sonic Brahmos.

My point is that a cruise missile so swift (with a flight duration of 3.6 min or even lesser) to reach its target the enemies wont get enough reaction time to retaliate with their Anti missile system