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Designing Wireless Sensors To Be Dropped Into Volcanoes
Thorfinn.au writes with this quote from El Reg:
"Topflight engineers based in Newcastle have hit upon a radical plan for warning of volcanic eruptions. They intend to build a heatproof sensor unit which can be dropped into a volcano's caldera and wirelessly transmit data to monitoring stations despite being possibly immersed in molten rock. 'At the moment we have no way of accurately monitoring the situation inside a volcano and in fact most data collection actually goes on post-eruption. With an estimated 500 million people living in the shadow of a volcano this is clearly not ideal,' explains Dr. Alton Horsfall of Newcastle Uni's Centre for Extreme Environment Technology. 'We still have some way to go but using silicon carbide technology we hope to develop a wireless communication system that could accurately collect and transmit chemical data from the very depths of a volcano.'"
Have we run out of virgins already?
Have gnu, will travel.
Finally, Scientology will be vindicated!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Even if the package is heat-proof, the electronics are going to fry.
Only a few? Why not all? ::rimshot::
Living With a Nerd
volcano information recorder going into netherworld
Venus, with temperatures hot enough to melt lead, has proven a tough nut to crack for probes hoping to return information about its awesomely hellish surface. But if we're talking about a small probe that can transmit while bobbing around like a cork in a lake of liquid rock... well, mere "lead-melting" heat should be a walk in the park for that little critter.
Send a craft with a few hundred of these guys in its hold, drop 'em on the surface, and find out what's going on with our evil-twin-sister planet. I especially want to know what's going on with the Venusian highlands, where there seems to be a radar-reflecting "frost" of heavy metals coating the ground. Even if all these probes can tell us is how blisteringly hot it is, that's got to tell us *something* about the environment. Venus sounds like a metal-ore refinery, and I'd love for someone to decide that it's worth a few (hundred) billion bucks to go get some of that Unobtanium (or whatever) and bring it back to Earth.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Are you saying the government is taking us for granite? I've been saying that for years.
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According to Horsfall and his fellow nails-tough tech developers, their carbide electronics can keep working up to temperatures of 900C. This is actually sufficient to withstand immersion in some lavas/magmas, though by no means all. In any case it's difficult to see how any wireless signal could be transmitted through molten minerals, so presumably the inventors are talking more about locating their kit in places within a caldera which - although extremely hot - are not enough so to actually melt rock.
The caldera is not a synonym for lava puddles. They're talking about putting a sensor in the caldera where it can detect gasses. It's not likely to be floating, much less submerged, and in fact that would presumably interfere with the mission of detecting various gasses.
(I've only read the article, not the papers)
Turns out the customer was one of the research labs (LANL or something, I forget which). They were measuring nuclear reactions, and using these scopes because they had a particular kind of sensor, but the tests were destructive, and every time they ran the experiment (once a week), they vaporized a scope. I think they figured out a way to sell the customer the sensor without wrapping it in all the fancy scopey packaging.
Yeah, it would be cool for someone to decide that. Trouble is, it's almost certainly not true. Someone did the math here on Slashdot once before (in the context of mining Mars) and came to the conclusion that even if there were bricks of solid platinum lying about on the surface of Mars, it wouldn't be economically feasible to recover them (given realistic estimates of the costs involved in going to get them and bring them back). Going to Venus would be even worse, both because of the extreme environmental conditions there and the fact that the metals are not, in all probability, lying about in the form of preprocessed bricks.