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sigma

The U.s. Department of Defence's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been working on a number of technologies designed to sniff out radioactive material, and it only deployed i,000 handheld scanners to test one of those systems in the nation'due south capitol. They way they did information technology was pretty unusual, though. Every bit the first big-calibration test of the SIGMA programme, DARPA put together a mock kidnapping gamble game.

Participants in the exercise were each given a backpack with a small SIGMA radiation detector. Each 1 is connected to a smartphone, which is used to build up a mesh network with all the other sensors. That's SIGMA, simply what near the kidnapping? In the scenario, a geneticist was kidnapped by mysterious masked men, and participants had to consummate a scavenger hunt-like game to solve the example. This doesn't actually take anything to do with how SIGMA will work, but it was a good fashion to get everyone to wander around the National Mall for the amend part of a day.

The purpose of this test was to see how these smartphone-linked sensors could cover open spaces. If you deploy a sensor cyberspace to detect serious nuclear threats, you need to make certain at that place are no holes in it. The final test of SIGMA mobile detectors was just 100 units, so this one was covered a much larger area of about 5 square miles. According to DARPA, the nerveless information will prove invaluable in perfecting the system, allowing constabulary enforcement agencies to accept one concluding line of defence force confronting the threat of radiological attack. Ideally, yous want to stop such materials from ever getting anywhere shut to an urban center.

SIGMA isn't simply geared toward detecting a traditional nuclear weapon. Counter-terrorism experts believe that the most likely radiological consequence would be a so-called "muddy bomb." These require less nuclear textile, niggling refining, and no advanced detonation equipment. A regular explosive is simply used to spread radioactive cloth over a wide surface area. SIGMA is designed to find even small-scale quantities of such material by scanning for gamma and neutron radiation. It provides live, minute-past-minute data on detected radiation.

The data gathered from the test will be used to perfect the concluding SIGMA operating software. Testing will continue through 2017, so SIGMA will be fabricated available to federal, country, and local agencies to take over radioactive monitoring duty.