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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday April 16 2017, @03:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the flying-high dept.

Experiments conducted high in the skies over New Mexico suggest that balloon-borne sensors could be useful in detecting the infrasound signals generated by small, extraterrestrial debris entering Earth's atmosphere, according to a report at the 2017 Seismological Society of America's (SSA) Annual Meeting.

Infrasound, sometimes called low-frequency sound, is sound waves that occur at frequencies lower than the limit of human hearing. Infrasound signals can remain strong as they travel over large distances, making them useful for pinpointing the location and size of events such as nuclear explosions, meteorite strikes, volcanic eruptions and sometimes earthquake ruptures.

Ground sensors can detect these signals, but very small infrasound signals can be swamped out by wind and other ambient noises gathered by these devices. So researchers including Eliot Young of the Southwest Research Institute and Daniel Bowman of Sandia National Laboratories are looking for quieter places to position these sensors— in this case tethering them to high-altitude balloons.

"Balloons are good for this because they float in the ambient wind field, which eliminates the wind noise that you would get with a ground sensor," explains Young. "The temperature of Earth's atmosphere is also such that it creates an infrasound waveguide—a place in the stratosphere where infrasound energy is concentrated and doesn't dissipate in the normal way."

The article is clearly a cover story for the real goal of the balloons, to eavesdrop on the elephants who are plotting to rise up.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @11:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @11:05AM (#494767)
    Are they recreating Project Mogul?

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul [wikipedia.org]

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