In the original “Superman,” Lex Luthor hatched a plan to create new ocean-front property by setting off a massive earthquake that would topple much of the western United States into the Pacific Ocean.
And while that may be a bit extreme, the fear of a massive earthquake hitting California and other western states is a very real one. But thanks to a NASA drone, scientists are working to map the fault lines in California.
NASA scientists are using a jet outfitted with a custom autopilot system and specialized radar to map the faults with extreme precision, report Wired. The system, known as Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), consists of a 10-foot-long pod that can be mounted to a variety of aircraft.
The radar flies over the earthquake faults with the UAVSAR pod takes hi-res images beneath the Earth’s surface. Its autopilot system allows it to repeatedly fly over the same areas within a 15-foot margin of error.
The data from a single flight won’t tell scientists much about the faults, but when the fault is scanned again hours, days, weeks or months later, any movement becomes evident using what is called interferometry – a practice that makes differences between multiple data sets obvious.
NASA is currently flying the UAVSAR-equipped jet over faults in the San Francisco Bay Area, central California and southern California, and the Los Angeles Basin (a geographic region that includes the San Andreas and Hayward faults, among others). Eventually the pod will be mounted to an unmanned aerial vehicle, decreasing the cost of the project and increasing the scanning time.
Using the data obtained from the scans, NASA plans to create a detailed picture of where, and how far, faults are moving.
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