Cruise Missiles – The Basis of Modern Missiles

by protius.0 in Military, October 6, 2010

With the ability of carrying huge payloads over long distances with enviable accuracy, cruise missiles are the mainstay of any army’s artillery force.

Cruise missiles are basically missiles which carry a payload and are guided towards the target by some guiding system like laser, etc. It is usually jet powered and they can carry a large payload over long distances. Modern cruise missiles have the ability to go supersonic. The warhead which has to be detonated is integrated in the vehicle and the vehicle is always sacrificed when the payload is destroyed.

Cruise missiles are mostly based on the World War 2 German V-1 rocket. But scientific advances have made it possible to correct or provide the course of the missile during its flight, rather than just at the beginning. Also, self correcting missiles have been invented which have the ability to navigate the terrain and avoid obstructions based on the data already fed to it.

The cruise missile is basically a small, pilotless plane on a suicide mission. Its objective is to deliver the bomb and destroy itself in the process.

US Tomahawk Cruise Missile (Image by cliff1066™ via Flickr)

Cruise missiles have a solid fuel booster which helps it to take off. Once take off is achieved, the solid fuel is exhausted and the booster falls off, and the turboprop engine starts and takes over the guided flight.

The main advantage of the cruise missile is the accuracy. They can hit a target very accurately even after a long distance flight, all the while doing its best not to get detected by radar by flying as low as possible below the radar limits. There are usually several guidance systems used to guide the missile to its target. One of them is the IGS, the Inertial Guidance System. It uses sensors and gyroscopes to detect the location of the missile. Another system called Tercom, short for Terrain Contour Matching, uses an onboard 3D terrain map to match the location of the missile. GPS is another system. Global Positioning System, as we all know it, is a very well known positioning system which uses satellites.

Finally, when the missile approaches roughly the area where the target is situated, it switches to DSMAC, Digital Scene Matching Area Correlation. This uses a camera and a digital image to compare and locate the target exactly. The cruise missile can also be equipped with thermal or night vision sensors for clearer identification.