"Before the jubilation," said Avinash Chander, Programme Director, Agni-III, "there were times we had heart attacks." The countdown for the launch had progressed smoothly. The long-range ballistic missile lifted off at 10.52 a.m. on April 12 from its rail-mobile launcher on Wheeler Island in the Bay of Bengal, 9 km from Dhamra on the Orissa coast. Optical radar stations at Dhamra, Chandipur-on-sea near Balasore in Orissa, Port Blair, and on two ships stationed in the Bay of Bengal, were tracking the missile.
As the Agni-III project team scanned the computer screens at the Mission Control Centre on Wheeler Island, they were horrified by the data loss reported from some of the radar stations. "The moment there is data loss, the first thing that comes to mind is that something [disastrous] has happened," said Avinash Chander, who is the Director of the Advanced Systems Limited, Hyderabad, which designed and developed the missile. It was another 70 seconds before the team breathed again and felt confident about the success of the mission.
What happened was this: as the missile climbed, its plume of jet exhaust blocked the radio signals (telemetry) from the vehicle to the ground stations resulting in attenuation of the signals.
After the missile's first stage fired for about 80 seconds, the second stage ignited and then the first stage jettisoned. The second stage burned for about 100 seconds before it broke away. During those 100 seconds, the missile's path was in a guided phase. In other words, its course was modified to reach the target. The warhead (dummy payload) then travelled with fine velocity control, re-entered the earth's atmosphere at the right altitude withstanding a searing temperature of 4,000Celsius and fell in the Bay of Bengal. The flight duration: 13 minutes.
At Wheeler Island the splashdown was greeted with applause and elation by the Agni-III team, including Avinash Chander; Dr. V.G. Sekaran, Project Director; D.P. Rao, Director, Integration; B. Sankara Rao, Director, Composite Products Development Centre, Advanced Systems Laboratory, Hyderabad; and Tessy Thomas, Associate Project Director. Among the others present were M. Natarajan, Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister, V.K. Saraswat, Chief Controller (Missiles and Strategic Systems), Defence Research and Development Organisation; and Prahalada, Chief Controller, R&D, DRDO (Services Interaction).
Agni-III is a two-stage, indigenously built long-range missile that weighs 48.3 tonnes and is 16.7 metres long. It has a diameter of two metres and can carry nuclear warheads weighing 1.5 tonnes over a distance of 3,500 km.
Natarajan called it a "significant success, particularly when the entire design, planning, material construction, execution and everything associated with the mission was indigenous". The hardware, software, instrumentation and tracking stations were indigenously built. The success was sweeter because it came after the failure of the maiden flight of Agni-III on July 9, 2006. "We wanted to demonstrate our success with our product, not by shooting our mouths off," said Dr. Sekaran.
About 258 industries in the public and private sectors were partners in the Agni-III mission.
T.S. SubramanianCOMMents
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