India has conducted its first successful test of the Nirbhay nuclear-capable cruise missile, developed by the country's Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), NDTV said Friday.
The missile test was conducted at the Integrated Missile Test Range in India's western Odisha state. The Nirbhay, which means fearless in English, is a very maneuverable and hard-to-detect missile with an operational range of 1,000 kilometers (621 miles).
According to NDTV, the sub-sonic cruise missiles will "start using signals from the country's space system" once "India's own satellite navigation fleet is fully deployed."
The Friday test was the first successful one. During the first test on March 2013, Nirbhay veered away from its trajectory and was destroyed in mid-flight to avoid the risk of it hitting the country's coastal areas.
Another cruise missile, a supersonic one, was developed by Indo-Russian joint venture BrahMos Aerospace, founded in 1998 by the Indian Defense Research and Development Organization and Russian rocket design bureau Mashinostroyeniya. The venture was named after two rivers, the Brahmaputra in India and Russia"s Moskva.
