Darpa Wants to Find Hidden Bombs the Way Doctors Find Breast Cancer
Darpa Wants to Find Hidden Bombs the Way Doctors Find Breast Cancer
To find hidden bombs, the U.S. military has tried everything from sniffing their chemical scent to shooting lasers into the ground. The Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers think they have a better paradigm: search for them the way physicians locate tumors.
Darpa recently launched a program called Methods for Explosive Detection at Standoff, or MEDS. The agency wants companies to “rapidly develop and demonstrate non-contact methods to detect explosives embedded or packaged in opaque media with high water content (e.g., mud, meat, animal carcasses)” using ultra-wideband microwaves, that “have shown promise for breast cancer detection,” according to a project solicitation.
In recent years, breast cancer researchers have had success using ultra-wideband, or UWB, to detect malignant tumors in breast cancer patients. It’s complicated, but involves zapping tissue at close range with signals from across the radio spectrum, at much wider range than conventional X-rays. To oversimplify it, the UWB waves bounce back and highlight healthy tissue while contrasting it with a darker-colored malignant tissue. If it’s possible to detect a tiny tumor with it, then it stands to reason that it may be possible to detect explosives hidden inside some wet mud or even a dead dog. (It happens.)