In a tweet, the DRDO said, “Very Short Range Air Defence System (VSHORADS) missile was successfully flight tested from a ground based portable launcher, off the coast of Odisha.”

The VSHORADS missiles were launched from a ground-based portable launcher at the Integrated Test Range (ITR) of the DRDO at Chandipur, off the coast of Odisha. The missile is a Man Portable Air Defence System (MANPAD) designed and developed indigenously by DRDO’s Research Centre Imarat (RCI), Hyderabad in collaboration with other DRDO facilities and various Indian industry partners.

A press statement from the Ministry of Defence said the design of the missile, including launcher, has been highly optimised to ensure easy portability. “Both the flight tests have completely met the mission objectives,” the release stated.

Officials said the air defence missile incorporates many novel technologies including miniaturised Reaction Control System (RCS) and integrated avionics, which have been successfully tested during the trials. The missile has been designed to neutralise low altitude aerial threats at short ranges and is propelled by a dual thrust solid motor.

The MoD said Defence Minister Rajnath Singh complimented and appreciated the efforts of the DRDO and industry partners and said this new missile equipped with modern technologies will give further technological boost to the Armed Forces. DRDO Chairman Dr Samir V Kamat congratulated the entire VSHORADS team on the successful tests.

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In a tweet, the DRDO said, “Very Short Range Air Defence System (VSHORADS) missile was successfully flight tested from a ground based portable launcher, off the coast of Odisha.”

The VSHORADS missiles were launched from a ground-based portable launcher at the Integrated Test Range (ITR) of the DRDO at Chandipur, off the coast of Odisha. The missile is a Man Portable Air Defence System (MANPAD) designed and developed indigenously by DRDO’s Research Centre Imarat (RCI), Hyderabad in collaboration with other DRDO facilities and various Indian industry partners.

A press statement from the Ministry of Defence said the design of the missile, including launcher, has been highly optimised to ensure easy portability. “Both the flight tests have completely met the mission objectives,” the release stated.

Officials said the air defence missile incorporates many novel technologies including miniaturised Reaction Control System (RCS) and integrated avionics, which have been successfully tested during the trials. The missile has been designed to neutralise low altitude aerial threats at short ranges and is propelled by a dual thrust solid motor.

The MoD said Defence Minister Rajnath Singh complimented and appreciated the efforts of the DRDO and industry partners and said this new missile equipped with modern technologies will give further technological boost to the Armed Forces. DRDO Chairman Dr Samir V Kamat congratulated the entire VSHORADS team on the successful tests.

The post DRDO successfully tests Very Short Range Air Defence System missiles appeared first on IMR.

The launch of the system was conducted against a high-speed aerial target mimicking an aircraft, which was successfully engaged. VL-SRSAM, jointly designed by three facilities of the DRDO for Indian Naval warships, is meant for neutralising various aerial threats at close ranges including sea-skimming targets.

“During the test launch, flight path and vehicle performance parameters were monitored using flight data, captured by various Range instruments such as Radar, Electro-optical tracking system (EOTS) and Telemetry systems deployed by ITR, Chandipur. The launch was monitored by senior scientists from various DRDO labs involved in the design and development of the system such as Defence Research & Development Laboratory (DRDL), Research Centre Imarat (RCI), Hyderabad and R&D Engineers, Pune,” said the Ministry of Defence in a statement.

The VL-SRSAM system has been designed to strike high-speed airborne targets at the range of 40 to 50 km and at an altitude of around 15 km. DRDO officials have said its design is based on the Astra missile, which is a Beyond Visual Range Air to Air missile.

Two key features of the VL-SRSAM are cruciform wings and thrust vectoring. The cruciform wings are four small wings arranged like a cross on four sides and give the projective a stable aerodynamic posture. The thrust vectoring is an ability to change the direction of the thrust from its engine control the angular velocity and the attitude of the missile, an official said.

VL-SRSAM is a canisterised system, which means it is stored and operated from specially designed compartments. In the canister, the inside environment is controlled thus making its transport and storage easier and improving the shelf life of weapons.

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QKD is primarily a mechanism to undertake secure communication which utilises a cryptographic protocol involving various components of quantum mechanics. The technology enables two communicating sides to come up with random secret keys shared by both of them and known exclusively to them, so only they can use it to encrypt and decrypt messages, thus achieving a very highly-secure communication.

In December 2020, the technology was tested for communication between two DRDO facilities in Hyderabad—the Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL) and Research Centre Imarat (RCI)—over a distance of 12 km.

A press statement from the Ministry of Defence said on the latest test, “This technological breakthrough was achieved over a commercial-grade optical fibre already available in the field. With this success, the country has demonstrated indigenous technology of secure key transfer for bootstrapping military-grade communication security key hierarchy. The performance parameters have been measured and have been found to be repetitively within the reported international standards at sifted key rates of up to 10 kHz. This technology will enable security agencies to plan a suitable quantum communication network with indigenous technology backbone.”

Secure communications are vital for defence and strategic agencies across the globe and the distribution of encryption keys is the crucial factor for it. Sharing of keys over the air or wired links requires encryption, which in turn requires encryption keys to be pre-shared. Quantum-based communication offers a robust solution to sharing the keys securely. DRDO has undertaken multiple projects for the development of this technology.

The technology is expected to help define standards and formulate crypto technology-related policies that can use the QKD system in a unified Cipher Policy Committee (CPC) framework in the country for more secure “key management” for current and future military cryptographic systems.

In the last week of December 2020, DRDO Young Scientist Laboratory for Quantum Technologies (DYSL-QT), a DRDO facility based in Mumbai, developed a Quantum Random Number Generation (QRNG), which has the ability to detect random quantum events and convert those into a stream of binary digits. The QRNG system developed by DYSL-QT passed the global randomness testing standards of NIST and Die-harder Statistical Test Suites at the speed of around 150 kbps after post-processing. The generated random numbers were also evaluated and verified using DRDO’s indigenously developed Randomness Testing Statistical Test Suite of Scientific Analysis Group. With this development, India had entered the club of countries that have the technology to achieve the generation of random numbers based on the Quantum Phenomenon.

Most of the large economies and defence powers across the world have in the recent past formulated dedicated plans for the development of quantum technologies. These countries include the US, Canada, several European countries, China, Japan and South Korea. India has seen significant policy decisions and budget allocation for the sector.

However, senior DRDO scientists and defence officials say that developments in India need to be seen especially in the context of several claims made by China. China has said that it has achieved multiple breakthroughs in the quantum technology domain that included the world’s first quantum satellite, the world’s first optical quantum computing machine prototype and also a 2000 km long quantum communication link between Beijing and Shanghai.

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