Integrated Undersea Surveillance System

Integrated Undersea Surveillance System

Introduction

Born of a three-way marriage of early Cold War strategic necessity, the Second World War, advances in underwater acoustics, and an extraordinary engineering effort, the pioneer of the Navy sound surveillance system - SOSUS - became A key, long-term early warning to protect the assets of United States against the threat of Soviet ballistic missile submarines and in providing vital information to tactical cueing, deep ocean anti-submarine warfare. And though subsequent developments - especially the end of the Cold War - SOSUS robbed of much of its mission, its history remains a subject based on how the lesson, science-based engineering development can lead to outstanding operational efficiency.

Integrated Undersea Surveillance System

As a key outcome of the project Hartwell findings, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in late 1950 funded by a contract with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT & T) and its manufacturing arm, Western Electric, to develop a low surveillance system based on long range sound propagation. Under this framework, Bell Telephone Laboratories initiated a series of experimental trials by installing low-listening arrangements outside Sandy Hook, New Jersey and Eleuthera in the Bahamas. In addition, AT & T adjusted their sound spectrograph, which has recently been invented as a tool for the analysis of speech sounds in a similar device called LOFAR - Low Frequency Analysis and Recording - designed to analyze low frequency under signals in near real time. Both LOFAR and spectrograph produced a frequency versus time representation of a sound "bite" at the time that the history of its spectral content was indicated by blackening of paper by a stylus sensitive to electrostatic extended several times along the axis of frequencies. In this way, the presence of submarine signatures distinctive sound - which includes both broadband noise and discrete frequency components (tonals) - can be discerned against the background of the ocean in the composite signal collected by a parent. This body of work, much of AT & T, was code-named Project Jezebel and placed under the direction of CAPT Joseph Kelly in the Bureau of Ships.

Meanwhile, the Navy continued to support Maurice Ewing, then at Columbia University's Hudson Laboratory, to study the phenomenology of low-frequency low sound. This effort, augmented by the additional work at Woods Hole and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, focused on establishing a solid understanding of long distance sound transmission project shows Michael. When the results of projects Jezebel and Michael met with the purpose of design, engineering, and deploying a wide area surveillance system planned by the Hartwell Frederick Hunt, the result of the effort - with the acronym highly classified SOSUS -- was finally given the unclassified designation, draft Caesar.

The first full size prototype installation SOSUS - 1,000 feet long line array of 40 hydrophone elements in 240 fathoms of water - was displayed at the bottom of a layer off Eleuthera UK cable in January 1952. After a series of tests successfully detect a ...