Of all the air to air missiles developed the heat seeking missiles have been the most effective in destroying enemy air crafts and of it the latest AIM-9M Sidewinderis THE best. Im gonna explain briefly how a sidewinder works in this post.
The heat seeking missile technology was developed by a Naval Physicist named Bill McLean back in 1947.Before that missiles were guided by radio signals reflected from the target aircraft. The missile had only a sensor but no radio signal generator for which it relied on the mother aircraft(which deployed the missile) But still, even without the generator the missile was heavy and bulky and unreliable with a hit rate of 1 in 10.
So what a Sidewinder does is that it seek out the heat given out by the engine of fuselage of the target aircraft using a sensing photovoltaic cell. This made the missile lighter, cheap and most importantly accurate.
Working:
The missile is at first placed beneath the aircraft and is connected to the main circuitry using an umbilical cable.When the pilot activates the missile, the missile is released and the motor on the missile is started. The heat seeker is placed at the front of the missile and it continually get the Infra Red signals from the target which is processed by the guidance control system and the flight path is calculated. The control actuation sectioncontrols the fins and nose of the missile making it follow the target.Another interesting thing about the sidewinder is that it doesnt detonate at hitting the target, but before the impact. A sensor within the missile calculate its distance with the target and when it approaches a predetermined value detonates the weaponry.
Latest Sidewinder:
The sidewinders have been improved several times since its introduction and the latest one is the AIM-9M sidewinder. It is 9 feet long with a weight of 85 kg and a wingspan of 2 feet. It costs up to $84,000 and can reach a maximum speed of Mach 2.5 (2.5 times the speed of sound).
For images of AIM-9M click here and here.
Future:
The successor to AIM-9M is the AIM-9X and to know more about it visit this site.
