Scientists at Penn State University have a new plan to help unearth clues about
Amelia Earhart’s doomed flight around the world—and it involves a
nuclear reactor.
On July 2, 1937, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were en route to Howland Island in the Pacific, about 1,700 miles southwest of Honolulu. They were six weeks and 20,000 miles deep into their trip around the world.
But Earhart and Noonan never made it to Howland. Somewhere along the way, Earhart’s Lockheed Model 10-E Electra [was lost] in the middle of the ocean. No one knows exactly what happened next.
People have long searched for any sign of the Electra in a huge swath of the Pacific Ocean, and there’s an entire cottage industry of Earhart theories and hoaxes out there. Skeletons,
crabs, firsthand accounts of people who might be Earhart, and even suspected pieces of debris emerge and are
considered in the public eye.
That includes one particular piece of metal that enthusiast Ric Gillespie
found in 1991 in a location 300 miles from Howland Island.
Daniel Beck, the manager of the engineering program for the Penn State Radiation Science and Engineering Center (RSEC), invited Gillespie and the famous piece of metal to the university. Beck told Gillespie they could try to [perform
neutron radiography on the sample.]
Using some of the reactor’s neutron beams, which operate like an X-ray, Beck’s laboratory can see trace amounts of things like paint that have worn off to the naked eye.
“A sample is set in front of the neutron beam, and a digital imaging plate is placed behind the sample,” Penn State says in a statement. “The neutron beam passes through the sample into the imaging plate, and an image is recorded and digitally scanned.”
In this case, the Penn State scientists can also study the edges of the patch to backform a story of how the patch was removed. One side of the patch, they say, appears to have axe marks. If so, the neutron beam can identify any scrapes of axe material that could be left.
The other edge, which appears to have been wiggled back and forth until it snapped off, likely wouldn’t have any trace metals. The patch will likely take months more to study in detail.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a35492760/amelia-earhart-disappearance-nuclear-reactor/
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