India has tested a new indigenous air-launched anti-radiation missile called NGARM fired from a Sukhoi-30MKI

File image - NGARM

India tests new anti-radiation missile to take out enemy radars


TNN | Jan 24, 2019, 08.28 PM IST

NEW DELHI: India has tested a new indigenous air-launched missile called NGARM, which is designed to destroy a variety of surveillance and radar targets on the ground after being fired from a Sukhoi-30MKI fighter.

This new-generation anti-radiation missile (NGARM), with a strike range of around 100-km, is the first indigenous air-to-ground missile to be developed by the DRDO, after the supersonic BrahMos cruise missile developed jointly with Russia.

“The missile was tested from a Sukhoi-30MKI on January 18 at the integrated test range at Balasore. The missile, with all systems functioning properly, hit the designated target with a high degree of accuracy in the Bay of Bengal. The NGARM can be launched from Sukhois from different altitudes and velocities,” said a source.

In another test on Thursday, the DRDO-Navy combine also conducted another test of the advanced Barak long-range surface-to-air missile (LR-SAM) system, jointly developed by DRDO with Israeli Aerospace Industries and Rafael, from destroyer INS Chennai on the high seas.

The supersonic Barak-8 missile system, whose interception range is 70 to 100-km, is in the process of being tested from Indian warships. Once fully operational, the LR-SAM will equip all frontline Indian warships as an all-weather “defence shield” against incoming enemy fighters, drones, helicopters, missiles and other munitions.

“It will be the standard LR-SAM or area defence weapon for our warships, much like the 290-km BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles have become the standard precision strike weapon on them. PSU Bharat Dynamics is already gearing up for producing the LR-SAM systems in bulk,” said an official.

The LR-SAM development project was sanctioned for Indian warships in December 2005, with an initial amount of Rs 2,606 crore, but was hit by several delays. Over a dozen Indian warships are currently equipped with the Barak-I system, “a point defence weapon” with an interception range of just 9-km, acquired from Israel after the 1999 Kargil conflict.


The new LR-SAM system with Barak-8 interceptor missiles, which have “active seekers” for terminal guidance, is a much more advanced version with extended interception range. The ground-based version of Barak-8, which was sanctioned in February 2009 for Rs 10,076 crore, will in turn be utilized by the IAF to plug the existing gaps in air defence coverage of the country.

Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

New-generation anti-radiation missile (NGARM)

Passive Homing

NGARM was sanctioned for development in 2012 at a cost of Rs 317.20 crores with a project completion date (PDC) of December 2017. However, that PDC has been extended according to DRDO sources and developmental trials are still underway. Like most other anti-radiation missiles (ARMs), NGARM’s primary guidance system is an on-board passive homing  head (PHH) with broadband capability, which allows it to discriminate and lock on to a target of interest among a number of emitters available in its field-of-view (FoV).

Image 1: Location of the PHH on NGARM. Source: DLRL Brochure distributed at DefexpoIndia 2018

This 2-D PHH has been developed by DRDO’s Defence Electronics Research Laboratory (DLRL) and can detect RF emissions from up to a 100 km away. DLRL’s PHH, according to the brochure/flyer, operates in the D-J frequency band and has a wider FoV than legacy PHH’s used on imported systems.  It also has a compact front-end owing to the use of monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) technology.

Image 2: Low Band and High Band elements of the PHH. Source: DLRL Brochure distributed at DefexpoIndia 2018

The PHH of course comes into play when the target is actually emitting. In legacy systems, a memory based autopilot using purely inertial guidance would typically keep the missile on an intercept trajectory towards the last known location of an emitter as detected by the PHH, once the target had stopped emitting. The actual success rate of such systems against relocatable emitters as well as those that were manned by well-trained crews maintaining strict discipline with respect to the duration of emission was very low. It was only with the advent of on-board inertial navigation systems (INSs) that could use updates from a global positioning system (GPS) to remove accumulated errors, that the success rate of ARMs showed significant improvement. NGARM, of course, has an on-board INS that can receive multi-constellation updates.

End-game

But what promises to make NGARM a truly contemporary system, is the fact that it could possibly be equipped with a millimeter wave (MMW) seeker in the future, which one could speculate operates in the W- band for the endgame. This would very much be in tune with Western trends towards the use of  terminal guidance on ARMs to counter emitter shutdowns. MMW-based terminal guidance means that by simply shutting down their radars quickly or by changing position and/or using decoys, enemy operators do not ensure the survivability of their systems. A good MMW seeker head should be able to discriminate between decoys and actual targets and also locate emitters that have packed up and are on the move within an arc of a few km.

To make the fullest use of its terminal homing capability, NGARM is propelled by a dual-pulse solid rocket motor built by Premier Explosives Limited (PEL) under transfer of technology from DRDO’s High Energy Materials Research Laboratory (HEMRL),  that allows it to strike targets between 15 to 100 kilometres (km)  away and  can be launched from a Su-30 MKI flying at  altitudes of  0.1  to 15 km. The missile is capable of operating in both lock-on-before-launch (LOBL) and lock-on-after-launch (LOAL) modes. 

Source: IAF 85th Anniversary Video

The dual-pulse propulsion (DPP) scheme is an outgrowth of the work done by DRDO’s missile complex and Premier Electronics Limited (PEL) for the long range surface to air missile (LRSAM) project, which is the first system for which DRDO has fielded a DPP motor. For NGARM, a DPP motor will allow it to reduce the reaction time that enemy mobile radars will have once they have been targeted during the close-in stage. Indeed, the combination of MMW-based terminal guidance and the DPP scheme certainly holds the potential for NGARM to become a truly lethal system for enemy radars.  Source: delhidefencereview.com

Su-30MKI: Details