Page 8 - Point Cloud News Today

Readout of what the hydrophone is listening to right now. all we really see is random ocean noise. if there was the beacon out there, you would see all of a sudden a strong spike at the 30 to 40 kilohertz range, the frequency that beacon is emitting. and a strong spike coming in once a second, and thats where you know youre within range. >> reporter: so how deep is the water here? >> here we are only at 40 feet deep. >> reporter: but just to give an idea. if you look on this side over here, its ...

>> this is the mapping s.o.n.a.r. so were going over a bit of a debris field here, as well. this s.o.n.a.r. is looking down, and its picking out where the -- where the points on the bottom are. and building that up into a 3-d cloud. and so youre able to get an image of whats beneath you and build up a 3-d point cloud as you go over it. once they know where the debris site is, theyre going to be using this type of s.o.n.a.r., similar, to build up a map of the layout of wreckage on the sea floor. ...

Field and how wide could the cone go? whats the latest technology? >> several technologies. side scan sonar would be the first tool. side scan would be towed off the bottom by a ship traveling at slow speed. the sonar array would be given a beam pattern about less than a kilometer wide, towing along about four knots and they would be looking realtime at the data, looking for anomalies on the bottom. if they were to find something that struck their interest, they would do multiple passes over it ...