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Mysterious metal towers are popping up at local [NYC] tunnels, and soon they'll start appearing at bridges, too.
But even people on the MTA [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] board in charge of the towers can't say why they're being used or what's in them, CBS2's Dave Carlin reports.
Jose Lugo said the tall metal towers quickly appeared up after the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel tolls[sic] booths came down.
"We don't really know what's the purpose of this," he told Carlin.
It's a $100 million MTA project shrouded in secrecy, with 18 of them for tunnels and bridges. So what are they exactly?
[...] [MTA Chairman] Lhota: "The base of these new pieces that are going up include whatever fiber optics are necessary for those Homeland Security items."
Z backscatter arrays?
(Score: 2) by jcross on Friday September 29 2017, @01:57PM (1 child)
In the video they showed a closeup of one of the "units" and it looked like behind the louvers it had a large square grid of round things, which reminded me of some kind of LED lighting array, I would assume not in the visible spectrum if that's what's it is. Does it look like a plausible component of an air sampling system?
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Friday September 29 2017, @02:32PM
Sure, there's a classic particle detector design where you shine light thru the air and have what amounts to a computer watching a microscope, with infinite patience, watch individual illuminated particles float by, then scale up the numbers to ug/cu meter or whatever.
Then you have the computer vision system play analysis games on the particles to bin them by particle size or even identify them "oh thats a spec of diesel soot, that's an individual concrete dust chunk, that's an anthrax spore, whoopsie sound the alarm"
Or its theater set crews mocking up something to trick us into thinking a RF station is an air quality station.
Or its something else, of course.