By Justin Grass/ reporter
NE Campus students and faculty were given insight into a different kind of radar Feb. 10.
John Lusk, NE adjunct math instructor, electrical engineer and Lockheed Martin senior research scientist, presented information about synthetic aperture radar, including how it works and how it is used, as well as general information about the electrical engineering field.
“It’s a broad field,” Lusk said. “But it’s also one of the more difficult fields.”
Lusk also introduced mathematical concepts relevant to engineering and SAR as well as specific processes such as Fourier transforming, where a signal is broken up into frequencies.
Lusk explained that SAR is used to create images of areas.
“It doesn’t exactly look like a picture, so it’s subject to interpretability,” Lusk said.
He used an example of an airplane with SAR flying over a field and creating an image of that field, which can then be examined to get information about the field’s features.
Lusk said there are hundreds of different systems in which SAR is implemented. SAR can be used by the military to find roadside bombs, by border patrol to watch for people crossing illegally, by NASA to monitor storm damage, and even to examine the features of other planets, he said.
“I watched a video about the debate on whether global warming was real or not,” NE and South student Diyan Dyakov, who is working on an electrical engineering degree, replied when asked why he decided to come to the seminar.
Dyakov said the video mentioned SAR as technology used by NASA. He said he found the presentation and SAR’s applications interesting.
Danella Herrera, a civil engineering major, said she thought the mathematical aspects of SAR, such as trigonometry, are applicable to her field as well.
