MIM-23 Hawk
Sign in to saveAlso known as MIM23, Hawk missile, Hawk SAM
1960s surface-to-air missile family by Raytheon
Key facts
- Type
- Surface-to-air missile
- Place of origin
- United States
- In service
- August 1960 –present
- Wars
- Cold War War of Attrition Chadian–Libyan War Iran–Iraq War Gulf War Second Libyan Civil War 2020 Turkish intervention in Libya Russo-Ukrainian War Russian invasion of Ukraine
- Manufacturer
- Raytheon Company
- Mass
- 1,290 pounds (590 kg)
- Length
- 16 feet 8 inches (5.08 m)
- Diameter
- 14.5 inches (370 mm)
- Wingspan
- 3 feet 11 inches (1.19 m)
- Warhead
- 119 pounds (54 kg) blast fragmentation warhead
- Engine
- solid-fuel rocket engine
- Operational range
- 28–31 mi (45–50 km)
- Flight ceiling
- 65,000 feet (20,000 m)
- Maximum speed of vehicle or missile span
- Mach 2.4
- Guidance system
- Semi-active radar homing
via Wikipedia infobox
~36 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The Raytheon MIM-23 HAWK ("Homing All the Way Killer") is an American medium-range surface-to-air missile. It was designed to be a much more mobile counterpart to the MIM-14 Nike Hercules, trading off range and altitude capability for a much smaller size and weight. Its low-level performance was greatly improved over Nike through the adoption of new radars and a continuous wave semi-active radar homing guidance system. It entered service with the US Army in 1959.
In 1971, it underwent a major improvement program as the Improved Hawk, or I-Hawk, which made several improvements to the missile and replaced all of the radar systems with new models. Improvements continued throughout the next twenty years, adding improved ECCM, a potential home-on-jam feature, and in 1995, a new warhead that made it capable against short-range tactical ballistic missiles. Jane's reported that the original system's single shot kill probability was 0.56; I-Hawk improved this to 0.85.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “MIM-23 Hawk” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.