"The army wanted the capabilities of the missile to be tested whileengaging a short-range target," the chief controller for research anddevelopment said. "We have successfully completed this userrequirement. The missile hit the target within three seconds after itslaunch from a Nag missile carrier."
The Nag, which has a range of around 2.5 miles, locks onto its targetusing an imaging infrared seeker and carries a high-explosive anti-tankwarhead for piercing the strongest tank armor. The Nag can be launchedday or night, the DRDO said.
User trials of the land version have been going on for two years in the deserts of the state of Rajasthan.
The first test of the airborne version, called Helina, will be from ahelicopter and is expected to be conducted by the end of the year. Butthe army is likely to clear the Namica-launched version of the missilefor use next month with immediate introduction.
The blunt-nosed Nag, which means Cobra, is a third-generation"fire-and-forget" anti-tank missile. It is part of the DRDO'sIntegrated Guided Missile Development Program started in the early1980s and is being developed by DRDO's own Hyderabad-based DefenseResearch and Development Laboratory.
Pre-production of the Nag has been at Bharat Dynamics in Hyderabad andinitial orders are believed to be for more than 440 missiles.
The blunt-nosed tandem solid-propulsion Nag weighs around 95 pounds, is6.3 feet long and 7.5 inches in diameter. The warhead can weigh up to18 pounds and the missile burns a smokeless nitramine propellant.
The U.S. Javelin and the Israeli Spike missiles are lighter for carrying by a soldier.
An earlier wire-guided Nag version was dropped because of technical difficulties.
The Namica-launched version of the Nag is a lock-on-before launchsystem by which the target is identified before the missile is fired.Range is limited to 2.5 miles because target identification of thetarget is visual.
The airborne Helina version will have a lock-on-after system extendingits range to nearly 4.5 miles. The missile will be launched in thegeneral direction of the target and feeds images back to the operatorwho then identifies the target for the missile to attack.
The more advanced Helina version will use a nose-mounted millimetric-wave active radar seeker.
