Yesterday’s article discussed some background information related to sonar mapping and echo location. Today’s article will describe a pinging demonstration. This will simulate what happens when a vessel sends out pings to map the ocean floor. (The concept of pinging was introduced in yesterday’s article.)
For this part of the demonstration you will need:
- a partner
- a small desk bell
- pencil
- watch or clock with a second hand
After you gather your materials, you are ready to get started.
- One of you will ring the bell (pinger) and the other will write down the results (recorder). Decide who will handle each job.
- The bell is your echo location device for pinging. You are just doing a simulation, so there will be a little pretending involved.
- The pinger rings the bell. When this happens, the recorder looks at the watch. This represents the ship sending a ping to the ocean floor.
- Then the pinger rings the bell again. (Let about 2 to 8 seconds elapse between the first and second bell ring. It should be a little different each time.) This represents the first ping being echoed back to the ship. The recorder notes the time elapsed between the first and second bell tone and writes it down.
- Keep repeating steps 1 through 4 to record at least ten different “pings”.
For the purposes of this demonstration, we’ll assume you collected this data for the 10 “pings”:
- 3 seconds
- 4 seconds
- 4 seconds
- 2 seconds
- 5 seconds
- 4 seconds
- 6 seconds
- 7 seconds
- 5 seconds
- 3 seconds
In a real situation, this data would represent the time it took for the sound to travel to the ocean floor and travel back to the ship. In tomorrow’s article, we’ll take a looks at how to transform this data into a picture of the ocean floor.
This article is part of the Sonar Mapping series. See the list below for links to the other articles in this series.
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