The laser that can 'see through' thick forest - and spotted a Stone age settlement in Ohio
- Stone age find was near the Beaver river in western Oklahoma
- Lidar technology was used to show the ground beneath, revealing ancients buildings and walkways hunters once used
- System set to scan a comet
It is technology that has travelled to Mars, is set to examine an asteroid, and has even spotted a stone age settlement here on earth.
Nasa has revealed the latest find from lidar technology - near the Beaver river in western Oklahoma.
Some 10,500 years ago, hunters gathered there each year.
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On the left is an aerial photograph of a forest in Connecticut. On the right, a bare-earth lidar image gives a view beneath the overgrown vegetation, where there are remnants of stone walls, building foundations, abandoned roads and what was once cleared farm land.
They funneled bison into narrow, dead-end arroyos — steep gullies cut into the hillside by the river — where they killed them en masse, sliced off the choicest meat and leaving behind piles of skeletons.
Walk through western Oklahoma today and there is little visible evidence of that ancient landscape, much less the hunting expeditions it hosted.
Few bison remain, and dirt and rocks have filled in many of the arroyos.
However, laser-based remote-sensing equipment called lidar has give archaeologists a clear view of the fossils and bones hidden below the surface.
And the technology owes a lot of its development to scientists looking at something very different: planets, moons and asteroids.
The story is one of 50 NASA technologies benefiting the public featured in the upcoming NASA Spinoff publication.
In lidar — or light detection and ranging — scanning, one or more lasers sends out short pulses, which bounce back when they hit an obstacle, whether clouds, leaves or rocks.
The instrument calculates how long it all took and, using that information, can calculate the distance.
An archaeological team led by University of Oklahoma's Lee Bement excavates a 10,500-year-old bison kill site near the Beaver River. Using lidar scanning, the team was able to narrow down sites to search further for prehistoric artifacts.
In the Beaver River area, the archaeological research team scanned the landscape with an airborne Teledyne Optech lidar device that benefited directly from the work the company has done at NASA — and the scans helped uncover important history.
'You'll never find bison bones with airborne lidar, but you can find the geological features that suggest a place to look,' said Meg Watters, who specializes in remote sensing and 3D imaging for archaeology.
The Teledyne Optech lidar builds a 3-D model of the surface that includes the grass, bushes and trees, but it can also produce a 'bare-earth' version, stripping all that away.
That allows archaeologists to 'see structures or features that were so overgrown that they wouldn't be obvious at all to someone on the ground,' explains Paul LaRoque, vice president of special projects at Teledyne Optech.
The lidar imaging has 'been useful in delineating where we need to concentrate our efforts,' says archaeologist Lee Bement, who leads research in the Beaver River area.
'It saved us a lot of time and effort.'
Data from lidar scans have helped lead to several other highly touted discoveries in recent years, including pinpointing the site of the legendary lost 'Ciudad Blanca' in Honduras.
George Shaw, an engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center, is the laser systems lead for the OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) mission, which will use lidar to map an asteroid, helping the mission team select a site to gather samples to bring back to Earth.
NASA has been incorporating lidar devices into missions dating as far back as the Apollo Program, and its work has helped advance the technology in ways that have paid off for many other applications.
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