India's indigenously developed surface-to-surface ballistic missile Dhanush was on Friday test fired from a naval ship in the Bay of Bengal off Orissa coast.
The test launch was conducted from INS Subhadra, about 40 nautical miles from Chandipur in the sea, at around 2.30 pm, sources said.
Dhanush, said to be the naval version of surface-to-surface missile Prithvi, was being exclusively developed for the Indian Navy and has a striking range of 250 km to 350 km.
It can be deployed as an anti-ship weapon as well as for destroying land targets, depending on the range.
It can carry both conventional and nuclear weapons in its operational stage. Friday's test launch, carried out by scientists of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, had been tracked from its take-off to impact point through an integrated network of sophisticated radars and electro-optic instruments for data analysis, the sources said.
The 8.56-mt-long missile had a launch weight of 4,600 kg and uses a single stage liquid propellant engine.
Dhanush was test-fired for the first time on April 11, 2000, from the Chandipur-on-sea integrated test range, but had failed at the blast-off stage due to a technical snag in its software system.
The second test was carried out from INS Subhadra on September 21, 2001. The two subsequent experiments were carried out on November 7, 2004, and December 28, 2005, from INS Subhadra and INS Rajput respectively, the sources said.
