Monday, August 6, 2018

Aspide is an Italian medium range air-to-air and surface-to-air missile produced by Selenia (now part of the Alenia consortium). It is provided withsemi-active radar homing seeker. It is very similar to the American AIM-7 Sparrow, using the same airframe, but at the moment of its introduction, the Aspide was provided withmonopulse guide instead of the conic scan, which made it more resistant to ECM and more precise. This innovation appeared on the Sparrows only with the late AIM-7M version. Closed-loop hydraulics were also substituted for Sparrow's open-loop type, which gave Aspide better downrange maneuverability.

First time introduced in 1973 and system is in service of many armed forces yet.
 It have target hitting range of 25km with 3.7 Mach speed. Its warhead is 30kg heavy and due to low weight of this system, many countries deployed them on their navy arsenals.


This resemblance, and the fact that Selenia was provided with the technology know-how of the AIM-7 (around 1,000 of which it had produced under license), has generally led non-Italian press to refer to the Aspide as a Sparrow variant. However, the Aspide had original electronics and warhead, and a new and more powerful engine. Even the control surfaces are different, replacing the original triangular wings, fixed in the air-to-air and instead foldable in the surface-to-air version, to a newly designed common cropped deltafixed version.

Due to its 96% hitting rate,
around one dozen countries bought them like China, Brazil, Pakistan etc.

 China used this technology for production of SD-10 BVR like missiles.
Pakistan airforce get its 10 batteries for protection of airbases.

#Saeed

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