Experimental MIT Technology Uses Microwaves to Create X-Ray Vision
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The new technology emulates the way the human eye sees. The spectrum of visible light reflects off of objects and into our eyes for processing; in the same fashion, researchers tried microwaves, which manage to pass through solid objects in large enough quantities to be picked up by the radar system.
Getting a picture wasn’t the only task though. The purpose of the project was to achieve picture and range capabilities necessary for military uses.
For that, the team of scientists turned to S-band waves, a particular part of the microwave band electromagnetic spectrum, and the same waves NASA uses to talk to shuttle pilots and space stations.
The waves are only about as powerful as a cell phone, so they must be coupled with signal amplifiers. With the boost, the technology can be used on concrete walls up to 60 feet away, for walls up to eight inches thick, and shows blobs representing human beings at 10.8 frames per second.
S-band waves were also chosen
Source: Christian Post
Microwave imaging system can detect when fruit is ripe
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This provides a more accurate way of judging the ripeness of fruits such as strawberries than assessing their colour. It could also lead to faster picking methods, because it can see through leaves and other visible obstructions.
Microwaves in particular are used because they are safe in low doses and pass through many substances but are stopped by water.
‘With the microwave approach you’re looking a little bit below the surface, so potentially the strawberries could be red but they might still be hard and not very full of water,’ said Dudley.
‘We can see where the strawberries are and see through the leaves. Certainly in strawberries, the leaves don’t have a particularly heavy water content so are fairly transparent and underneath the strawberries stand out very nicely.’
The system could even be used to detect disease or determine whether the crops need different amounts of fertiliser or water by continually monitoring them to see how their water content changes.
Source: The Engineer