After the missile clears the submarine, a 7-second burst from its rocket boost motor blasts it out of the water. Once airborne, its turbojet engine starts, its wings spread, and it noses over to hug the surface at about miles km per hour toward its target. Over water, the missile relies on inertial guidance, perhaps also the global positioning system, for navigation.
Tomahawk Cruise Missile Submarine-launched versions of the Tomahawk cruise missile entered service in There were three types: anti-ship with conventional warhead, land-attack with conventional warhead, and land-attack with nuclear warhead. The missile is 21 feet 6. It is long-ranged and very accurate, but the exact figures are classified.
In , nuclear Tomahawks were withdrawn from service and placed in storage. A cruise missile's job in life is to deliver a 1,pound kg high-explosive bomb to a precise location -- the target.
The missile is destroyed when the bomb explodes. Cruise missiles come in a number of variations see the links at the end of the article for more information and can be launched from submarines , destroyers or aircraft. When you hear about hundreds of cruise missiles being fired at targets, they are almost always Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from destroyers. Cruise missiles are 20 feet 6. At launch, they include a pound kg solid rocket booster and weigh 3, pounds kg. The booster falls away once it has burned its fuel.
The wings, tail fins and air inlet unfold, and the turbofan engine takes over. This engine weighs just pounds 65 kg and produces pounds of thrust burning RJ4 fuel.
The fuel load is to 1, pounds about kg of fuel at launch, or approximately gallons liters. The missile has a cruising speed of mph kph. The hallmark of a cruise missile is its incredible accuracy. A common statement made about the cruise missile is, "It can fly 1, miles and hit a target the size of a single-car garage. The IGS is a standard acceleration-based system that can roughly keep track of where the missile is located based on the accelerations it detects in the missile's motion click here for a good introduction.
Digital scene matching takes images captured by the missile while in flight toward its target and matches them to images taken prior to the flight, during mission planning, according to a paper describing digital scene matching from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which helped design the system. Another aspect of the system's navigation is a tool called terrain contour matching.
This system compares images from a previously acquired contour map and compares them with measurements that a radar altimeter makes on board the missile. Based on input for the terrain-matching algorithm, the system can update its inertial navigation system — a set of sensors, such as accelerometers and gyroscopes to measure rotation — to reorient itself.
If something in the terrain changes or the mission gets canceled, the people monitoring the missile can redirect it with a simple command, Harmer said. In the past, historical mapping might have been done by a plane on a reconnaissance mission a week earlier, and the military could only hope nothing had changed. Nowadays, because drones and satellite imagery are ubiquitous, "they're taking live updates until the missile hits the target," Harmer said.
The accurate navigation allows the missiles to fly low to the ground, meaning they can fly closer to other objects and often evade radar detection by foreign military. They are also capable of taking a nonlinear route to a target, which makes them well-suited for evading dangerous areas en route to a target, according to the U. Their ability to take a nonlinear route also means multiple missiles can be launched from different locations and all land at the target at the same time, Karako said.
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