Penn State researchers subject an old, worn sheet of aluminum to a particle beam from the heart of a nuclear reactor in hopes of solving the mystery of Amelia Earharttheir disappearance.
Earhart is celebrated as the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic, and is also at the center of one of the most famous historical mysteries, one that has fascinated enthusiasts since that fateful day in 1937 when her Lockheed Electra 10E disappeared from all. radar. On July 2 of that year, Earhart, along with her navigator Fred Noonan of Papua New Guinea, took off in an attempt to circumvent the world. But the couple never landed at their destination, Howland Island, in the central Pacific. During the flight, Earhart made contact with the Coast Guard ship Itasca, which apparently had problems with the radio and instrument and was unsure of her exact location. Earhart, Noonan and her Electra were never found.
In 1991, Earhart enthusiast Richard Gillespie found an aluminum panel in washed-out storm debris on the island of Nikumaroro, about 480 kilometers from Howland. Gillespie said he suspects the panel may have come from Earhart’s plane, and now a Penn State team is using a neutron beam to discover hidden clues that could support the hypothesis. (Gillespie is the executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR, which launched a project in 1988 to solve Earhart’s disappearance.)
“At first I was a little skeptical,” said Kenan Ünlü, a professor of nuclear engineering at Penn State. said in a statement. ‘We’ve had inquiries about this kind of thing before, but we’ve had an extensive call with [Gillespie], which was clear that they were interested in the data we could provide, even if it proved that the patch could not possibly belong to Amelia Earhart’s aircraft. We agreed to see what we could see. ‘
Related: The Incredible Life and Times of Amelia Earhart
The researchers hope that a technique called neutron radiography could reveal otherwise invisible clues as to the origin of aluminum. Researchers have already determined that an ax was chopped along its edges, except for the one side that was ‘repeatedly bent’ to cut it off from its source.
The firing of neutron beams from the Breazeale Nuclear Reactor on campus should reveal any features of the panel that are made of anything other than uniform aluminum, the researchers said. If the metal were just ordinary aluminum, the neutrons would run clean. But any carbon or hydrogen-containing molecules on the surface – for example, pieces of coral that filled in a serial number in the metal – would scatter the neutrons. And the pattern of scattered neutrons would form an image of the coral (or other material) in the same way as a X-ray image reveals the bones in your arm.
Welsey Frey is the director of the McClellan Nuclear Research Center (MNRC) at the University of California, Davis, another site that uses a nuclear reactor for the same types of advanced neutron imaging. He and his team are not involved in the Penn State project. He said the Penn State investigation is likely to reveal interesting features of the aluminum plate that could help connect it to the Earhart aircraft or refute the connection. But it is unlikely that they would find definitive proof that the aluminum came from the aircraft in question.
“Will they get information about what era that metal was made of? Yes, probably they will. Will they be able to tie it to Amelia Earhart’s plane? Probably not.”
Neutron radiography is similar to X-ray imaging, he said. X-rays pass through the soft tissues of the body, but reflect the harder tissues or bones, which on average consist of heavier atoms that tend to block X-rays. Neutrons similarly pass easily through certain materials, such as aluminum, but they tend to bounce off materials that contain hydrogen and carbon.
If the researchers were lucky enough to get hold of an aluminum plate from Earhart’s plane with a serial number hidden under organic material such as coral – and if the serial number was on a list confirmed to belong to her plane belongs – neutron radiography can definitely prove the origin of aluminum. It also has the advantage that it does not damage the object, unlike others such a serial number. But it will take a lot of luck, Frey said.
The Penn State researchers also plan to use a related technique known as neutron activation analysis to accurately identify the chemical composition of the material, according to Ünlü.
“This approach can determine the constituents of a material at a sensitive level of parts per million or parts per billion,” he said.
Frey said it’s much more promising. Different alloys have been used at different points in history for different purposes. If the aluminum appears to be to use an alloy that, for example, was not developed until World War II, it could not be from Earhart. But if it matched the alloys used in Earhart’s era to build aircraft, it would strengthen the case to link it to her aircraft. (Frey said he used the same technique to see if a horseshoe found in his backyard was possibly from a Vaquero – one of the Spanish-speaking cowboys who reportedly wetted their cows in a pond near his home – in the 19th century .. His analysis of the steel showed that it came before World War II, which supported the theory. But it does not prove the connection.)
The results of the Penn State analysis will only be made public later this year, the researchers said. They did tease that they had discovered new information, but said they needed to refine their approach to imaging this object before they were sure.
Originally published on Live Science.