26.09 NASA Radar Technology Helps Rescuers Find Disaster Victims
LORTON, Virginia, September 25 (by Karin Zeitvogel for RIA Novosti) There were no cries for help coming from beneath the piles of concrete where a building once stood, just an eerie silence and the sounds of gravel crunching underfoot as rescue workers Mark Lucas and Samuel Sandeen walked up and down the disaster site on the outskirts of this Virginia town, looking for signs of life.
Then, a faint beep came from the small metallic suitcase they were wheeling up and down near the mounds of crumpled concrete, and a small computer screen lit up and indicated that underneath the rubble and dust, there was a human heartbeat.
Within minutes, the rescuers from Fairfax County Fire and Rescue, who have taken part in search and rescue operations in Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Haiti, and the Pentagon after the 9/11 terror attack, had pulled Rachel Horwitz from the rubble.
Happily, this was just a test to demonstrate a new radar device that goes by the acronym FINDER, which stands for Finding Individuals of Disaster and Emergency Response, and is based on remote-sensing radar technology developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, to monitor the location of spacecraft.
Unlike other rescue tools, like sniffer dogs and heat-detecting devices, FINDER picks up the heartbeats and breathing of victims by beaming a low-power microwave signal less than 1/100th of what a mobile phone emits onto the target area that rescuers are focusing on, such as a building thats collapsed in an earthquake.
