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Secret weapon? How thermal imaginghelped catch bomb suspect

AFP - Getty Images file

A South Korean quarantine officer monitors a thermal scanner as passengers from an international flight arrive

at Incheon Airport in 2009. Thermal imagery can determine remotely whether a person is running a fever.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

Thermal-imaging devices have been used to seek out pot-growing operations, map Martian geology

and now, to watch the prime suspect in this week's Boston Marathon bombings as he was holed up in

his last hiding place.

Authorities said a helicopter equipped with a thermal imager spotted the heat signature of a person

inside a tarp-covered boat, sitting in a backyard in Watertown, Mass. Police used the sensors after an

area resident reported seeing a trail of blood leading to the boat and catching a glimpse of a blood-

covered body inside. The thermal readings confirmed that there was indeed someone under the tarp,

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and that the person was still alive.

"Probably been there all day,"

a senior police official told NBC

News. "He wasn't moving at

first. He is now."

After monitoring the body in

the boat for more than an hour,

police moved in and seized the

wounded bombing suspect, 19-

year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev .

Thermal imagers can spot the

signature of a body or other heat source inside a house, a v ehicle, or in this case, a v essel. Walls may

stop visible-light wavelengths, but heat can still pass through. The variations in heat emissions can be

picked up by camera chips designed to be sensitive to the infrared part of the spectrum. The

signature would be particularly noticeable when there's a significant difference between the

background temperature and the temperature of the heat source.

Police have long used such devices to find out whether marijuana is being grown inside a house, using

heat lamps. In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that the use of thermal scans to monitor heat sources

inside a person's home should be considered a "search" under the Fourth Amendment, and thus

would require a warrant. The court said such scans could reveal private details about the homeowner,

including the time of night when "the lady of the house takes her daily sauna and bath."

Thermal imagers have been taken to other worlds for instance, aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey

orbiter, which analyzes variations in the composition of the Red Planet's surface using the Thermal

Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS.

Immigration authorities have used thermal scanners to look for the signs of fever among arriving

passengers, and researchers have been experimenting with them as a lie-detector technique.

In 2009, FBI investigators used thermal imagers to search for bodies in the neighborhood where

Cleveland serial killer Anthony Sowell lived. That may well have been the most notorious case where

the technology was brought to bear. Until now.

More about thermal imaging:

Infrared holography ID's fire v ictims

Like Pinocchio, your nose shows when you lie

New tech gives soldiers Predator-style vision

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking"

the log'sFacebook page, following @b0yle on Tw itter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your

Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about

science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every

weekday. You can also check out"The Case for Pluto,"my book about the controversial dwarf

planet and the search for new worlds.

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Alan Boyle, Science Editor,NBC News

Science editor at msnbc.com, author of

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