Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Robots Fly Over Antarctica

Posted by samzenpus on from the the-mountains-of-madness dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have successfully run a series of flights by autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) over Antarctica. These robotic planes have a 2-meter wingspan and weigh 6 kilograms. They are powered by Lithium Ion Polymer (LIPo) battery packs — similar to the ones in your cellphones or laptops. So far, these autonomous UAVs have completed about 20 flights lasting 40 minutes each. These robots can fly over 45 kilometers while taking about 100 measurements per second about the exchange of heat between the lower atmosphere and sea ice. According to one of the scientists, 'the future of atmospheric research will be robotic.'"

3 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Collecting data by webmaster404 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Conclusion: the ice is melting. We knew that already.. we even have a good idea of the rate at which it is melting and how fucked we are going to be as a result. Now that we know this, can we please do something about it? Or are we just not ready for that yet? Another 20 years of study perhaps?

    But we don't know really the root cause. Sure we are quick to point the blame at cars and factories but also farting cows are to blame perhaps even more then us. So really, we can prove that the ice is melting, what we can't prove is what is to blame. There is no point in going 5 steps backwards only to find out that it really wasn't anything we did.
    --
    There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
  2. Re:Collecting data by Matteo522 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Problem is, if you don't understand the root cause and the system well enough, you could make things much worse. Ever solve a bug that seemed pretty straightforward only to cause major data corruption later down the line?

    This isn't just an analogy. It has only been until recently that we've recognized global dimming as a real phenomenon that we've pretty much undoubtedly caused ourselves from all the particulates we spew into the atmosphere. So let's say that to solve global warming we drastically cut down on air pollution from cars, factories, and power plants. Seems straightforward, right? Well, that cuts down on atmospheric particulates, which increases the amount of solar energy reaching the earth and causes a net INCREASE in temperature.

    So it's not entirely Pascal's wager -- we do have something we could lose by being wrong.

  3. Robot? Really? by Fishbulb · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I have a hard tim e calling this a robot. Maybe it's just all those years of model rockets, R/C doohickeys, and Lego Technics sets that let you program them using straight gear segments on a flat card, but giving something a pre-programmed flight path just doesn't qualify as "robot" to me. More like "fancy R/C plane".

    Hell, even my PT 109 R/C boat had "programmable" movement patterns if you didn't outfit it with R/C gear.