Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems unveils a new long-range stand-off air-to-surface missile at the Aero India Air Show in Bengaluru, India, this week.
The new projectile, named Rocks, is an advanced, stand-off range air-to-surface missile, which can be launched at a distance sufficient to allow attacking personnel to evade defensive fire from the target area. The missile can be used against high-value targets, stationary and re-locatable, even in theaters where the enemy employs effective GPS countermeasures.
Equipped with either a penetration or blast fragmentation warhead, the missile can destroy above-ground or well-defended underground targets in heavily surface-to-air-defended areas.
Rocks is launched at a significant standoff range, well outside of the enemy’s air-defense coverage area, and performs a high-velocity trajectory towards the target. This minimizes the launch aircraft exposure to threats, as well as improves the strike success rate.
Rocks uses its INS/GPS for mid-course navigation while homing on to the target is performed by using its optical contrast seeker and advanced image processing algorithms, which ensures hitting targets with great precision, overcoming GPS jamming or denial.
“Rocks answers a growing demand for long range, GPS-independent Air-to-Ground precision strike capability”, said Yuval Miller, Executive Vice-President and General-Manager of Rafael’s Air & C4ISR Systems Division.
“Aero India is an excellent opportunity to present this new system, and we can proudly say that as of today, Rafael is well-situated in India with a broad industrial base, Joint-Ventures, indigenous companies and a substantial Indian supply-chain, as part of our commitment to the ‘MAKE-IN-INDIA’ policy”, Miller added.