Four bombers of the 37th Air Army - two Tu-95MS and two Tu-160 - conducted training launches of cruise missiles during an exercise held today. According to an Air Force representative, the launches, which took place at one of the northern test sites, were successful. Tu-22M3 medium-range bombers also took part in the exercise, conducting cruise missile launches at the Gurianovo and Emba test sites. Previous exercise of this kind took place in April 2006.
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Will anyone let me know how the cruise missile can identify landmarks while flying over Siberian region which is only an ice expanse and also prone to continuous changes? Also whether those tested had stealth characteristics?
Sharma , the Cruise Missile usually fly over carefully chosen preselected path , The path(obtained via Sats or Aircraft ) are usually digitised and stored in the CM memory , Then the Navigation is via Inertial Navigation System with regular updates from GLONASS/GPS to take care of (correct) Errors accumlated over Long Distant Flight.
In the Terminal/Final Phase of Flight , The Target is matched with the target Image stored in Missiles memory , Via a small camera in CM.
Alternatively a Radar or IIR Imaging could be used or even a combination of Both to verify the Targets on Ground/Sea in different environment conditions.
And the Target can then be attacked via Preset Profile or even Real Time decision taken by Missiles Algorithim with data recieved from the Missile Onboard Sensors.
Newer CM can also receive a newer target while in flight and can Discard Its old Target and move to newer ones , Alternatively they can Loiter over a Givn area and attack Target/s of Opportunity.
As far stealth goes , Russia has quite some experience in development of RAM which helps in reducing the RCS of existing CM by many factor, Remember the CM itself is a small Target with RCS value nearing 0.5 ~ 0.1 sqm
There are some suggestions (Janes etc ) that the newer 5000km range Kh-101 CM under development has been designed from Scratch taking Stealth into consideration.
Austin-
Thanks for the input. Sometime ago it was in papers that Russian system of stealth also employed ionised stream of particles around fighter aircraft which they claimed totally camouflages or shifts location of target away generating a virtual target. Is it true? When U.S. initially made stealth fighters they claimed they had answers for enemy stealth systems which were also simultaneously developed by U.S. Could you throw some light on this?
"Is it true?"
I do not know about the location shifts thing, but in regards to plasma stealth, that is how it is generally known,they were speaking BS.They cannot (not yet or for the foreseeable future anyway)cloak the whole airplane because the ions disperse too fast.Plasma stealth however is being considered to reduce the radar signature of some
SU-27 derivative (I can't remeber if the SU-35 or else).In this case however it would be used to cover the radar antenna, as it would be inside and protected from the air stream the ion dispersion would not be a crippling issue.