New Delhi: India's BrahMos surface-to-surface cruise missile could have failed in its first-ever user trial on Tuesday at the Pokhran test range of Jaisalmer in Rajasthan.
Sources say the Indo-Russian missile failed to hit its target after it was fired by the Army on Tuesday morning.
The test-firing is first ever to be conducted by the Army after the missile was inducted in June 2007.
The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) said that there was was "small hitches" in the last stage of the test-firing but sources say the missile did not meet its 'operational parameters' and deviated from the pre-planned course.
Sources say the test-fire was a setback but 'quiet normal' during the development of any new missile system. More firing trials will be required to identify faults in the system.
The BrahMos, which has been described as a stealthy cruise missile that can deliver a 200 kg payload to a target 290 km away at speeds exceeding 2.8 Mach, has been in service with the Navy and was inducted into the Army in 2007.
Surprisingly, the first user test firing took place almost two years after its induction indicating that the missile was being fine-tuned by the joint Indo-Russian scientific team that is working on the project.
BrahMos has been named after rivers Brahmaputra of India and Moscow of Russia.
During the visit of Russian Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov to India late last year, an agreement was reached between the two countries for development of a hyper-sonic BrahMos missile, an improvement on the already-developed supersonic missile, termed as "the most advanced" in its category.
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