Underground security tech to revolutionize border security
cut it the signal doesn’t stop flowing from the cut back to the Helios unit,” he said.
The resolution of the cable can be set to one-meter intervals, which means that the location of a cut cable, or people, or vehicles, can be pinpointed instantly to within one meter along a section of cable up to fifty kilometers long.
Moe Momayez, associate professor of mining and geological engineering at the UA Lowell Institute for Mineral Resources, is co-author of a report detailing the recent Helios tests.
“We can install cables up to 50 kilometers in length with only one Helios detector,” he said. “Because the 50-nanosecond laser pulses travel at the speed of light, we can detect any event virtually instantaneously and deploy the appropriate resources to that location.”
These 50-kilometer cable lengths, each with a Helios detector, can be strung together indefinitely to cover vast distances. For example, the border between the United States and Mexico is 1,969 miles, or 3,169 kilometers. Although the extreme topography of some border areas would make cable deployment difficult, dividing the border length into 50-kilometer segments equates to approximately sixty-four cable sections and detector units.
It is envisaged that Helios might be integrated into a larger system that includes mobile surveillance vehicles, such as those currently used by border patrol agents. For this and many other reasons it is too soon to name the cost of monitoring the U.S.-Mexico border, but all on the project agree it would be significantly lower than the ineffective barriers deployed to date, such as steel fences, disconnected grids of sensors, or hi-tech virtual fences.
Momayez’s report co-author is Kevin Moffitt, a research scientist at the UA National Center for Border Security and Immigration. They conclude in the report that “with sufficient training, an observer could reasonably differentiate between events triggered by a group of people, cattle, horses, digging tunnels, cars or even ‘stealthy’ border crossers.”
Fotech is already working on automating Helios operation. Once a database of signals has been built up over an extended period of time, advanced pattern-recognition software could be employed to automatically identify events detected by the Helios system. The system would generate an alert if the software determined that a border crosser was being detected.
Zonge and Fotech have signed a two-year agreement to develop a border security application. The next step, according to the report, is a limited deployment along a stretch of border with a known high volume of border-crossing traffic. Zonge is seeking funding for this extended field trial, results from which would most likely be released at the discretion of the funding agency.
Zonge is considering working with a technical partner that could provide large-scale analysis and storage of the volumes of data that the test system will gather. Representatives from a major defense contractor were present at the tests, as was an observer from the office of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Because Helios can detect if people are digging in or moving through underground tunnels, the system has great potential for perimeter security — prisons, for example – and mine safety. If such a system were installed in a network of mine shafts and tunnels, a trapped miner could just tap on the rock wall and the system could pinpoint his location to within a couple of feet.
