Weighted Oceanographic Registration Mine (WORM)

Omni Technologies, Inc. proposes to study the design feasibility of a sensor and data acquisition package to be used in the monitoring and collection of mine burial and mine burial forcing function data. The data will be used to improve military mine burial models to determine the detectability of buried mines and help define mine hunt training curriculums. The sensor and data acquisition package will collect and store data for three months with a default sampling time of once per hour. The design goals will include having minimal impact on environmental forces driving mine burial by placing sensors inside the mine or embedding them in the mine walls and to operate in any orientation and preserve the center of gravity, weight and target strength of an operational mine. The Phase I design/study will search for off-the-shelf (or slightly modified) sensors to measure acoustic energy, mine attitude, mine orientation, acceleration and water depth. Additionnally, two innovative sensors to measure percent burial and boundary layer water currents will be studied in Phase I and prototyped in the Phase I Option. A top level software design will be developed to provide for data storage, retrieval and display.