Side-scan sonar

Applications include surveys for marine archaeology, shipwreck hunting, search and recovery (SAR), and environmental monitoring.

Side-scan uses a sonar device that emits conical or fan-shaped pulses down toward the seafloor across a wide angle perpendicular to the path of the sensor through the water, which may be towed from a surface vessel or submarine (called a “towfish”), or mounted on the ship's hull.

When stitched together along the direction of motion, these slices form an image of the sea bottom within the swath (coverage width) of the beam.

[3] One of the inventors of side-scan sonar was German scientist, Dr. Julius Hagemann, who was brought to the US after World War II and worked at the US Navy Mine Defense Laboratory, Panama City, FL from 1947 until his death in 1964.

The first commercial side-scan system was the Kelvin Hughes "Transit Sonar", a converted echo-sounder with a single-channel, pole-mounted, fan-beam transducer introduced around 1960.

In 1963 Dr. Harold Edgerton, Edward Curley, and John Yules used a conical-beam 12 kHz side-scan sonar to find the sunken Vineyard Lightship in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts.

A team led by Martin Klein at Edgerton, Germeshausen & Grier (later E.G. & G., Inc.) developed the first successful towed, dual-channel commercial side-scan sonar system from 1963 to 1966.

For surveying large areas, the GLORIA sidescan sonar was developed by Marconi Underwater Systems and the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences (IOS) for NERC.