New Underground System Monitors US-Mexican Border
Analysis by David Teeghman
Tue Dec 21, 2010 07:25 PM ET

A new invisible border-monitoring system could radically alter how the United States secures the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. Known as Helios, the new border-monitoring system uses laser pulses transmitted through fiber-optic cables in the ground to detect movement on the surface: specifically, illegal immigrants.

A Tucson, Ariz.-based company called Zonge recently installed a Helios test system in the desert outside Tucson.

The small vibrations caused by a moving object on the surface above hit the fiber-optic cables buried in the ground, slightly distorting them. The distortion creates a "unique signature change in the laser pulses," according to The Engineer. That distortion can be detected by a Helios detector at at least one of the cable's ends.

The Arizona desert is home to many animals like coyotes and wolves that criss-cross the border every day. That's not what researchers and government agencies like the Border Patrol are worried about. They're mostly concerned with people sneaking into the United States illegally.

Helios is sensitive enough to detect small animals like dogs, and it can also discriminate between animals of different sizes on the surface. A horse will cause larger vibrations than, say, a human. The Helios system can also detect when people are running, walking, or digging, and in what direction.

Scott Urquhart is the president and senior geophysicist Zonge, the company behind Helios, and i senior geophysicist. "When very small vibrations hit the fiber-optic cables, the cables are slightly distorted," he says in a press release. "This distortion creates a unique signature change in the laser pulses, which can be detected by the Helios unit."

Each individual Helios detector can track about 30 miles of cable, which means the 1,950-mile long U.S.-Mexico border would need more than 60 of these devices to monitor its entire length.

The system can track a moving object on the surface to within three feet along a section of cable. The University of Arizona's College of Engineering are conducting experiments on the Helios system, to determine how wide an area the cables can monitor activity, among other things. Depending on how successful the system proves to be in detecting humans moving across the border illegally, Helios detectors may soon monitor the entire U.S.-Mexican border.

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