SEOUL– South Korean military investigators said Friday the botched launch of a homegrown ballistic missile in October appears to have been caused by an error related to a component measuring the missile’s airborne attitude.
The authorities announced the outcome of their two-month probe into the failure in the Oct. 4 firing of the Hyunmoo-2C missile, which raised doubts over its performance and reliability, as well as operators’ proficiency.
The military fired it from the eastern coastal city of Gangneung in a tit-for-tat move for an earlier North Korean missile launch. It crashed inside a military base after flying on an abnormal trajectory. No casualties were reported as its warhead did not explode.
An error from the data — measured by the “gyroscope” and sent to the missile’s actuator section consisting of its wings and nozzle — is suspected to have caused the failure, according to the investigators.
To determine the cause of the failure, the military ran over 30,000 simulations of possible errors of the missile’s parts and compared the resulting missile flight trajectories with that of the failed launch.
A simulation of an error in data sent from the missile’s Inertial Navigation System (INS), which contains the gyroscope, produced a missile trajectory in the same shape as that of the October launch.
While the INS consists of numerous sensors, the military assessed that the problem with the gyroscope — essential for the measurement of the missile’s attitude — was likely to be a cause of the failure.
“There are many parts inside the gyroscope, and we don’t know which one malfunctioned,” a military official said on condition of anonymity, calling the gyroscope defect “unusual.”
The military plans to conduct a safety check on all Hyunmoo-2C missiles from later this month through March.
To prevent similar accidents, it plans to develop a flight safety device for the missile model, which would allow the missile’s warhead section to detach from the propellant if the missile goes off course during its flight.
The military rejected a lack of training as a possible cause of the launch failure.
“It’s difficult to say the exact number, but it was not the first time the Hyunmoo-2C was fired this year and (the previous ones) were all successful,” the military official said. “A lot of training is carried out before the launch button is pressed.”
The investigation was carried out by officials from the defense ministry, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the state-run Agency for Defense Development.
Source: Yonhap News Agency