Page 10 - Side Scan News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Floor. >> it's just remarkable to see it like this. can you get this in one pass? or does it need multiple passes? >> it depends how close the vehicle is to the bottom or how high and big the area is but it could be one pass or multiple passes. >> i want to look at another image from a side-scanning sonar. this is a close-up of one ship. >> this is fantastic. this is the path of the vehicle. so the robot is heading in this direction, sending out pings to either side like this and the sound comes off and bounces off objects. when you see that, it is a hard return. a shadow behind it. this is a ...

>> this is fantastic. this is the path of the vehicle. the robot is heading in this direction, sending out pings to either side. the side comes and bounces off objects. it is a hard return. a shadow behind it. this is a ship sitting on the bottom and you can see it went over the top of the ship. it leaves a gap beneath the vehicle. why they call it a side scan or side-looking sonar. >> when you get an image like this it is actually two images with the center. >> it is two beams on either side of the vehicle. exactly. port side and starboard side. >> it is not from a plu fin but on a search you...

Images might look like. i want to put them up on the screen and have you take us through them. so what are we seeing? >> what you see is almost like -- it's called a swath from the side scan but it's almost like a highway. you have an image on the left,en an image on the right and a center hope area where you have no data in the middle. that's called the nader gap. what happens is the way the system has to work is it has to do what we call mowing the lawn. it will go forward, take data. it will come back and overlap the swath so you can fill in all the data. the thing about the bluefin and is ...

Is it's moved slightly further north. the area they were originally searching in the 40s is much worse seas so that e greatly hampers search efforts. so this area of the seas are a little better, although the winter is coming. in terms of the sea floor in that area, it's relatively flat and also relatively old so that's, again, good news in terms of comparing it with the air france flight. that's very young sea floor so it has a lot of lava exposed at the surface. in this older sea floor, what you have is heavy sediments. so the good news with the heavy sediments is when you use side scan sona...

Travel further. i'm optimistic for several reasons. one is they have repeated signals they've detected. and when i say "repeated signal," it's not one pulse, it's pulses, plural. and the other thing is that they tightened up the area a bit. it still needs to be a smaller area to have effective side scan sonar and sonafication. >> one things searchers have to prepare for is you don't get another ping. let's say the batteries are dead. how big an area are they talking about, then? let's say those are all the pings you hear from the black box. where do they have to side scan or sonar scan? >> 17 ...