WELCOME to the weird world of blue cones. No, it's not a model of a surreal futuristic city, but a room vital to ensuring that satellites collect accurate environmental data. To enter, you go through what must be one of the strangest-looking doors on the planet (below).
Inside, you can hear your own heart beat. That's because it's an echo-free zone called an anechoic chamber. Rather than killing sound echoes, though, this one absorbs microwaves, making it perfect for calibrating antennas that use microwaves to monitor environmental change.
Sergey Pivnenko, who runs the chamber at the Technical University of Denmark, has used it to test antennas for measuring the water content of soil and the salinity of the sea. Data on both are critical to monitoring and analysing weather patterns and climate change, he says. Pivnenko had the echo-absorbing cones made in blue instead of the traditional black to make the working environment less gloomy.
Photographer Alastair Philip Wiper snapped the chamber as part of a project to capture the beauty of otherwise utilitarian scientific and industrial spaces. "You're not used to being in a room with abstract spikes that look really threatening, but which are really colourful, almost like a movie set or fantasy," he says.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Echo-free zone"
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