Page 15 - Point Cloud News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

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 that's where you know you're 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, it's showing you what's on the bottom of the floor right here of the water. >> exactly. so this is the...

>> this is the mapping s.o.n.a.r. so we're going over a bit of a debris field here, as well. this s.o.n.a.r. is looking down, and it's picking out where the -- where the points on the bottom are. and building that up into a 3-d cloud. and so you're able to get an image of what's beneath you and build up a 3-d point cloud as you go over it. once they know where the debris site is, they're 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. >> reporter: one of the questions we have -- this looks like a pipeline here. one of the questi...

Field and how wide could the cone go? what's 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 to define what it is better. the next step up in sonar would be multibeam which, again, is a multip...