BrahMos, the supersonic anti-ship cruise missile jointly developed by India and Russia, was on Wednesday successfully flight-tested at an undisclosed location in the Bay of Bengal off the Orissa coast.

The test was conducted from the naval ship INS Rajput, defence sources said.

The missile is just over eight metres in length, 670 mm in diameter and weighs 3000kg. It combines the propulsion system and self-homing device of Russia's 'Yakhont' or 'Onyx' system with sophisticated on-board computer guidance systems developed by Indian scientists.

BrahMos (acronym for Brahmaputra and Moscow) has a range of about 290 km with a 200 to 300 kg pay load or conventional warhead mass depending on the version, the sources said.

Primarily an anti-ship missile, BrahMos also has the capability to engage shore-based radio-contrast targets. It can be fired from multiple platforms - ship, land, submarine and air, the sources said.

Launched from a ship, it can fly up to a height of 14 km at Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound).

It has a preset trajectory, but a sensor on the head tracks the target and can change the missile's course to strike up to 20km from the targeted range.

The missile also has a device to skim at near-surface level.

About 40 Russian scientists along with their DRDO counterparts witnessed today's trial, the defence sources said.

India is represented in the project, code named PJ-10, by the Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO) and Russia by the design firm NPO Mashinostroyenia.

BrahMos was first test-fired on June 12, 2001 from the ITR launch complex at Chandipur and on Wednesday for the first time the missile was test-fired from a ship, the sources said.