Irone dome is an air defence system capable of destroying incoming short range rockets & artillery shells from distances upto 4 to 70 kilometers away.The above you-tube video shows the live working of the Iron dome during Israel - Hamas war.It is developed by the Rafale Advanced Defence Systems headquartered in Haifa,Israel.The project was started in the aftermath of the second Leabanon war in which Hezbollah is believed to have fired more than 4,000 rockets inside the Israeli terrority causing death of 44 Israeli civilians.Part of the funding for the development of Iron dome is given by the united states.It consists of three main components a radar,a battle management & control system & an interceptor launcher.The radar tracks the incoming missiles & sends the data to BMC(Battle Management & Control system).BMC decides whether to engage the rockets or not based on an in-built software program which calculates whether the incoming rockets will hit the populated areas or not & then an interceptor missile with electro optic sensors is launched to destroy the rocket at mid-air.The cost of the Tamir interceptor is around US$35,000 to 50,000.
Iron dome has made 421 interceptions during the operation "Pillar of Defence" began.Though the main disadvantage of Iron dome is that it cannot intercept rockets that can change their targets in the mid-air after launch.Such rockets can be programmed to hit other installations while descending on their target.So Israel is readying another type of defence system known as David's Sling.India is said to be interested in buying Iron dome from Israel among many other countries who are interested in this state of the art system.Eventhough of high cost the system is highly reliable.For more information like these subscribe to my blog for email updates.
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