Active Gravitational Imaging

            Active imaging was developed to overcome certain fundamental limitations in resolution that passive scanning had reached, gravitational imaging is a process which detects the irregularities in a gravitational field, and interprets them as to build up a map of fluctuations across the target body. Such information is useful as it allows cartographers and geographers to access information to the structure of the target and also to its composition, light continental granites, and denser oceanic basalts will provide distinct signatures on imaging and reveal macro-geology of the body in investigation.

            Where as passive methods use only sensors alone to measure gravitational field fluctuations, active imaging uses a similar sensor in conjunction with a powerful gravitational emitter, the actual method is not too dissimilar to ultrasound technologies. A powerful pulse of gravitational energy is directed at the target object, and the way matter in target reacts to the pulse reveals information about its density and composition.

            If the pulse interacts with a dense material such as a metallic core in a planet, this material strongly ‘absorbs’ the pulse and generates a strong interaction with the emitter, whereas a diffuse gas, which is not very dense at all will not respond so strongly to the pulse, and so there is little interaction with gas and the emitter.

            As interactions with the emitter carry information about the target the sensors consist of delicate instrumentation buried in the emitter itself. The emitter material behaves in much the same way as the sensor used in passive scanning, when a powerful energy source is applied to the material, such as high energy gamma rays, this induces the material to produce a gravitational wave along an axis of emission. However when this material is placed in a gravitational field its physical characteristics change in response, usually by a change in pd perpendicular to the fields source, this change can be detected by the instrumentation.

            Active scanning provides very high resolution imaging of a targets interior, and allow for the creation of three dimensional models of the target body, this method is more than accurate to detect the fine detail of magma plumes that form volcanic islands, and to also detect the faulting along tectonic plates.

            However active scanning requires some very sophisticated technology, and the powerful emitter is large and difficult to install in small cartography vessels, and tends to affect other ships systems such as propulsion, which like sensor relies on distortions in space-time. For this reason most ships carry basic passive scanning systems and only large vessels carry the more complex active scanning systems.