New Delhi: India successfully test-fired a new generation nuclear-capable ballistic missile Agni Prime from a defense facility off the Odisha coast in Balasore on Friday. According to the defense official, the indigenously developed medium-range missile was launched at around 9.45 am.
During the test flight, the missile traveled the maximum range and all test objectives were successfully met, the officials said.
With this third consecutive successful flight test of the Agni Prime missile, the accuracy and reliability of the system have been established, they added.
According to the media report, The performance of the system has been validated using the data obtained by many range instrumentation like radar, telemetry, and electro-optical tracking systems deployed at different locations including two down-range ships at a terminal point to cover the entire trajectory.
The ‘Agni Prime’, or ‘Agni-P’, is a nuclear-capable new-gen advanced variant of the Agni class of missiles; it is a two-stage canisters missile with a maximum range of 2,000 km. The surface-to-surface ballistic missile has a strike range of 1,000 to 2,000 km.
The first test was in June last year, with the second six months later – in December. On both those occasions too the missile ‘followed textbook trajectory and met all mission objectives with a high level of accuracy’, officials said.
(Vinayak)