Patent ID: 8117040

Claim:
A method of evaluating a threat posed by a substance, the method comprising the steps of: (a1) airdropping one or more remotely controllable sensing units into an area containing a potentially hazardous substance, wherein the remotely controllable sensing units are spherical with an off-set center of gravity, such that the remotely controllable sensing units roll upon hitting ground to properly position various inlet and outlet ports associated with a sample collection mechanism of the remote sensing units for sample collection; (a2) obtaining an image of a spectrograph of the substance with one or more remotely controllable sensing units comprising a mass spectrometer; (a3) transmitting the image of the spectrograph of the substance from the one or more remotely controllable sensing units to a control unit configured to automatically detect and identify the substance and generate a corresponding report; (b) uploading the report, via the control unit, to a remote server via a system chosen from the group consisting of a cell phone network and a satellite phone network; (c) determining an actual geographic location of a remote sensing unit detecting the substance using a GPS device located on the remote sensing unit, communicating the actual geographic location to the control unit, and identifying an appropriate local reporting authority and an appropriate local reporting policy based upon the actual geographic location of the remote sensing unit detecting the substance; (d) notifying, via the control unit, at least some members of a hierarchy of authorities, including threat response authorities and evaluation authorities, of the report, wherein the evaluation authorities include a plurality of experts having knowledge relevant to making a high-level threat assessment; (e) determining, via the control unit, a hierarchy of threat evaluators, including the appropriate local reporting authority and a plurality of experts having knowledge relevant to making a high-level threat assessment; and (f) instructing at least some members of the hierarchy of threat evaluators to access the report on the remote server via a wide area network.