Babur Cruise Missile - Database

[Safriz]

^^ We cannot say anything for sure,can only speculate with good reason....China has Yaogan series SAR satellites up there and SUPARCO may have acces to them,
But commercial services like this Elevation+ : Astrium GeoInformation Services
give 10 meter and even lesser elevation accuracy and full 3D modeling of terrain at a price...
Its same as we can say Google maps was only available to head of KGB / CIA / President of USA until 80s..But now its free for all...
Likewise very accurate SAR imagery is now commercially available and not restricted to military..

 

[gambit]

May be you are not understanding the original question,or we didnt put it the right way.....Obviously a TERCOM in Tomahawk cannot be of poor quality,but the many Iraq war documentaries we watched on Nat geo or other channels did say that in the initial wave of attack on Baghdad almost all the Tomahawks were fired from Persian gulf flew via the zargos mountains,instead of flying directly over the desert to Baghdad which was the shorter route.
Do you think this flight path for tomahawk was chosen for stealth or TERCOM accuracy? or both?

You are still jumping to conclusions. Radar detection of hostile airborne intruders do not like terrain. In war, the shortest route is often the most lethal because it lulls the gullible into death traps. So if we can exploit the tactical advantage of terrain that does nothing to diminish our impact at the target and preserve element of surprise -- take the terrain.

This where I do not understand why this baseless claim that desert terrain is somehow detrimental to radar data processing is taken so seriously. The US have desert, mountainous, bodies of water, sea, and cities. Why would we deploy a cruise missile that cannot handle desert terrain? I do not understand the logic here.

You should educate yourself on the desert and correct your thoughts instead of wanting to sound professional and knowledgeable with no avail; Cruise missiles need to follow a programmed route of the terrain and the desert terrain with its ever moving and form changing sands according to the winds is just not programmable, so in reality one does not need such sophisticated missiles to fly over a desert area nor is it practical in a desert war.


Wind and sand create majestic dunes
that are constant but ever-changing.
They move across the deserts,
sing to the wind and
inspire our creativity!

Sand Dunes - Phenomena of the Wind! (DesertUSA)

Show me a credible source that say sand dunes moves as swiftly as sea state.

 

[gambit]

Here are some websites stating smae or similar things about Tomahawk


Weapons - Trainor On The Tomahawk | The Gulf War | FRONTLINE | PBS
Q: What's the problem with the guidance system of the Tomahawks?

Trainor: The Tomahawk missile was a cruise missile. And it was designed to follow specific terrain features. With using satellite photography we would get the picture of the ground and this would be digitized in a form that could go into a computer that would be in the Tomahawk missile, so that when the Tomahawk was fired it simply would match what was in its program with the terrain features on the ground and follow it like a roadmap to its target. Now the problem in the Gulf War was that the desert region over in Kuwait and in Iraq was so flat that there were very few signposts. So what the Navy did was make use of the programming that went over Iran, where there were mountains, the Zagros Mountains, which gave a very clear identifying signal. And they had programmed the missiles over the Zagros Mountains long before the Iraqi crisis. This was the route that the Tomahawk missiles were going to take when they went into the Soviet Union if there had been a war with the Soviet Union. So they simply took that and modified it so that when the missiles were halfway up the Zagros Mountains on the course to the Soviet Union they'd make a left turn and go the east towards Baghdad. So in that sense all they had to digitize was the space between where the left turn took place and Baghdad. And that's what they did and that's the way the missiles were fired.

This is a piece written in 1998
Picking Smart Weapons: From Atoms To Bits - Chicago Tribune
Picking Smart Weapons: From Atoms To Bits
April 24, 1998|By Bart Kosko. Bart Kosko is an associate professor of electrical engineering at University of Southern California and author of the cyber-thriller novel "Nanotime."

How smart is it to shoot smart weapons at Iraq? Does the United States still hold a working monopoly on smart technologies? Can Saddam Hussein hit back with his own smart technology?

Smart weapons have grown smarter since the U.S. first fired Tomahawk cruise missiles against Iraq in 1991 (and again in 1993). Those dumber missiles could not find their way over the featureless sands of the desert. They instead had to invade Iran's air space and fly over Iran's Zagros Mountains. Then their on-board computers could match their stored terrain maps against the rich mountain features below.

Those were the results of poor programming.

Here is the problem...

If I start out with the assumption that I must have terrain variability as part of a triad of data processing: altitude, position, and radar, if any of those legs do not have commensurate accuracy and precision with each other, then at certain points in the process, I will have a failure.

Take altitude for example, if I have two sources of altitude information, and if each one of them demand priority, meaning each of them insist that IT is the correct one, then both sources must have precision and accuracy within a certain percentage of each other. The two sources are: radar altimeter and recorded. There lies the problem: what is recorded to be 100 meters is not real time but radar information is. So if my terrain intelligence is inadequate and my programming expects both to be within 1 meters of each other, I must have a provision on how to deal with the possibility that they will out of range of each other. If I add pitot/static altimeter information into the mix, I must compensate for real time air pressure differential between a hot day, high humidity, or coming storm. Now I have three sources of altitude information: recorded, radar altimeter, pitot/static. The last two are real time information. All of them I programmed to be within 1 meter of each other. That is an extremely 'tight' criteria. Any out of bound condition and I must give the cruise missile a default alternative: pitch up or self destruct.

What happened back in Desert Storm was the result of inadequate satellite imagery of desert terrain. Inadequate in the sense that those terrain intelligence did not contain sufficient variability in features -- like hill tops -- for the system to correlate what it was programmed to expect and what it sees in real time through radar altimeter. So the argument that somehow slow moving sand dunes 'confused' the cruise missiles is absurd. When the missile is flying over the terrain at several hundreds km/h while a moving sand dune moves how many meters a day...???

 

[Safriz]

Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM) navigation system uses an on-board contour map of the terrain that a cruise missile will be flying over. The system "sees" the terrain it is flying over using its radar system and matches this to the map stored in memory. A Tercom system considerably increases the accuracy of a missile compared to the older and simpler inertial navigation system (INS). A Tercom system also allows a missile to fly lower, making it harder to detect by ground radar.
TAINS

A Tercom system is usually employed together with the inertial navigation system. The inertial navigation system provides a rough positional information. The Tercom unit uses this information to find an approximate area on the map where the missile may be. By comparing the contour map with the actual contour reading provided by the radar, the Tercom obtains a more precise estimate of the position. The corrected information is fed back to the INS. This combined system is called the TAINS system (Tercom-Aided Inertial Navigation System).

A Tercom system requires very accurate maps of the path to target (for example, at 1-meter resolution) and a radar able to obtain precise changes in elevation. When flying over water, contour maps (elevation information) are replaced by magnetic field maps.

An explanation of how Tercom works and how system deals with flat surfaces.

 

[The SC]

You are still jumping to conclusions. Radar detection of hostile airborne intruders do not like terrain. In war, the shortest route is often the most lethal because it lulls the gullible into death traps. So if we can exploit the tactical advantage of terrain that does nothing to diminish our impact at the target and preserve element of surprise -- take the terrain.

This where I do not understand why this baseless claim that desert terrain is somehow detrimental to radar data processing is taken so seriously. The US have desert, mountainous, bodies of water, sea, and cities. Why would we deploy a cruise missile that cannot handle desert terrain? I do not understand the logic here.


Show me a credible source that say sand dunes moves as swiftly as sea state.

I said : like the sea, it needs specific specs, not the desert equals the sea in movements , but it is in movement too, just like the sea is in movement, sometimes swifter than the sea (depending on the winds) and sometimes calmer, again just like the sea.

 

[Thorough Pro]

^^ We cannot say anything for sure,can only speculate with good reason....China has Yaogan series SAR satellites up there and SUPARCO may have acces to them,
But commercial services like this Elevation+ : Astrium GeoInformation Services
give 10 meter and even lesser elevation accuracy and full 3D modeling of terrain at a price...
Its same as we can say Google maps was only available to head of KGB / CIA / President of USA until 80s..But now its free for all...
Likewise very accurate SAR imagery is now commercially available and not restricted to military..

The only difference is that commercial imagery can not and will not provide imagery of classified zones, which are thousands of square miles around a sensitive millitary / civilian installtion. even in google earth you can not see vast areas of ,many western countries but you can see 100% of non-friendly (to west) countries, and vice versa.

 

[gambit]

I said : like the sea, it needs specific specs, not the desert equals the sea in movements , but it is in movement too, just like the sea is in movement, sometimes swifter than the sea (depending on the winds) and sometimes calmer, again just like the sea.

This is all nonsense. I have sat in the WSO's seat of an F-111E at 50 meters altitude over the Channel. I tuned the TFR to pick up surface waves and the aircraft responded. Made for a very bumpy flight. But generally, any TFR system does not care about surface waves. As long as the rise and fall of the waves are within a programmed range determined by the Douglas Sea State scale...

Douglas Sea Scale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

...Then the FLCS will not respond. So do not tell me that shifting sand dunes moving glacially compare to the average sea state of the English Channel is going to throw off a radar.

 

[Safriz]

www.defence.pk/forums/pakistan-stra...advanced-missile-technology-nescom-chief.html

NESCOM being an employer of 16000 engineers and technicians,plus self supporting via export of defence tech is a reliable source of all missile tech for pakistan
No wonder Baburis such high tech missile.
The thred i posted is from 2007 ,and back then NESCOM had multiple high tech gear gor pakistani defence forces....Must have improved many fold in the last 5 years.

 

[SBD-3]

An interview with Dr Samar Mubarik some more info about Babur at 1:04 to 1:40
Dr. Samar Mubarak Mand - Babur Cruise Missile - YouTube

 

[regular]

An interview with Dr Samar Mubarik some more info about Babur at 1:04 to 1:40
Dr. Samar Mubarak Mand - Babur Cruise Missile - YouTube

Man this interview is from 2007 very old now.......

 

[SBD-3]

Man this interview is from 2007 very old now.......

the point is that babur has 5 optical camras to identify and pinpoint the target and matching it with internal map

 

[The Deterrent]

the point is that babur has 5 optical camras to identify and pinpoint the target and matching it with internal map

Not exactly...Dr. Mand was talking about the TOTAL number of on-board cameras. In the test-flights, there are a couple of other on-board cameras which provide live feedback of the flight and are kept for technical study later on.

 

[Nishan_101]

Dear Brother,
Satellite Images are available to even common person from Google Earth and Google Maps etc. but this is not something that is enough to guide a Missile TERCOM or navigation. for this we need military grade imaginary.
SUPARCO have given the 2014 as the year for the launch of our first Remote Sensing Satellite System (PRSSS):
http://www.defence.pk/forums/pakist...an-remote-sensing-satellite-system-prsss.html

this will help to get what we need in satellite imaginary for missile guidance via TERCOM.

As for now, Pakistan have an agreement with China and we have access to Military Grade Images from Beidou Navigation System. It is not that we can use ANY commercial satellite provided images for this operation as they will lack the details and precision required.

Currently the Beidou coverage area is as:

it is reported that by 2020 it will be transformed into a complete Global Navigation System.
so what i think/assume is that after the launch of PRSSS, we will have coverage of our immediate area of concern via our own satellite and for global navigation, Pakistan may well adopt the Beidou-2 navigation system.

for the ever changing desert profile, this is not a big problem since the missile is fitted with multiple guidance systems, the inertial guidance being the main system and supported with Satellite Guidance system.

regards!

I hope that Pakistan will invite KSA, Oman, UAE, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait to make our own GPS. Ameen.

 

[regular]

I hope that Pakistan will invite KSA, Oman, UAE, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait to make our own GPS. Ameen.

I don't think any possibility for that to happen in future......but I could be wrong in my assessment but I'm damn sure about that assumption.........

 

[Safriz]

I don't think any possibility for that to happen in future......but I could be wrong in my assessment but I'm damn sure about that assumption.........

For now Chinese navigation system Beidou will do the job for Pakistani military needs...